


°; 




q5 



^% I 



A^ 






V 



: / 













7 -£- 



^ 















^V^ 















^ 






^ N - 






a\ V 



I? ^ 



^ * ., 

















t -^ 




V 




- 






- 

< 




A. cP 

















7 c 













































if 5 °«. 



IC P 










< 















^r. u f i uU*ijf t 



si^'.r ■ 



bfk/r 



THE 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



OF 



LEIGH HUNT. 



; Most men, when drawn to speak about themselves, 
Are moved by little and little to say more 
Than they first dreamt ; until at last they blush, 
And can but hope to find secret excuse 
In the self-knowledge of their auditors." 

Walter Scott's Old Play. 



A NEW EDITION, REVISED BY THE AUTHOR; 

WITH FUETHEE REVISION, AND AN INTRODUCTION, 
BY HIS ELDEST SON. 



LONDON: 
SMITH, ELDEE AND CO., 65, COKNHILL. 



M.DCCC.LX. 






48 65 5 5 

AUb i i 1942 



CONTENTS. 



Introduction 



Page 

V 



Chap. 

I. — The Author's Progenitors 
II. — Childhood 
III. — School- days 
IV. — School -days (contin ucd) 
V. — Youth 

VI. — Playgoing and Volunteers 
VII. — Essays in Criticism 
VIII. — Suffering and Eeflection 
IX.— The "Examiner" 

X. — Literary Acquaintance 
XI. — Political Characters 
XII. — Literary Warfare 
XIII. — The Regent and the " Examiner " 
XIV. — Imprisonment 

XV. — Eree Again — Shelley in England 
XVI. — Keats, Lamb, and Coleridge 
XVII. — Voyage to Italy 
SjtVIII. — Return to Eirst Acquaintance with Lord 
and Thomas Moore . 
XIX. — Lord Byron in Italy — Shelley — Pisa 
XX. — Genoa ..... 



Byron 



1 

25 

45 

74 

97 

106 

124 

145 

155 

161 

175 

192 

205 

210 

224 

243 

257 

278 
283 
309 



IV 



CONTENTS. 



Chap. Page 

XXL — Florence — Bacchus in Tuscany — The Venus de' 

Medici — and Italy in General . . .327 

XXII. — Return to England . . . . . 356 

XXIII.— At Home in England . . . .366 

XXIV. — Literary Projects ..... 374 

XXV. — Play-writing — Conclusion . . • . 388 

XXVI. — Life Drawing towards its Close . . . 403 

Postscript . . . . . .411 



INTEODUCTION 

BY THE AUTHOR'S ELDEST SOX. 



This edition of the Autobiography was revised by Mr. 
Leigh Hunt, and brought down to the present year by 
his own hand. He had almost completed the passages 
which he intended to add ; but he had left some portions 
which were marked for omission in a state of doubt. 
From the manner in which the work was written, 
points of interest here and there were passed over 
indistinctly or omitted altogether, and some inaccu- 
racies were overlooked in the re-perusal. In a further 
revision by the writer's eldest son, several obscurities 
have been cleared away, inaccuracies have been cor- 
rected, and omissions have been supplied. The inter- 
polated passages, whether in the text or in notes, are 
distinguished by being included in brackets. 

In the Preface to the earlier edition, the Author 
avowed that he felt a difficulty in having to retrace a 
life which was marked by comparatively little incident, 
and was necessarily, therefore, mainly a retrospect of 
his own writings. Another difficulty, of which he was 
evidently conscious only through its effect in cramp- 
ing his pen, lay in an excess of scruple when he 
approached personal matters. In the revisal of this 
second edition, however, the lapse of time had in 
some degree freed him from restraint ; and while 



VI INTRODUCTION. 

the curtailments necessary to compress the bulk of 
the volume have been made principally in the more 
detailed portions of the literary retrospect, the addi- 
tions have tended to increase the personal interest of 
the text. The work is relieved of some other por- 
tions, because they may be found in his collected 
writings, or because the subject-matter to which they 
refer is out of date. The result of the alterations is, 
that the biographical part of the volume is brought 
more closely together, while it is presented with greater 
fulness and distinctness. 

The reader of this Autobiography will find it less a 
relation of the events which happened to the writer, 
than of their impression on himself, and the feelings 
which they excited, or the ideas which they prompted. 
This characteristic of the writing is in a great degree a 
characteristic of the man, and thus the book reflects his 
ow T n life more than on a first judgment it might be sup- 
posed to do. His whole existence and his habit of mind, 
were essentially literary. If it were possible to form 
any computation of the hours which he expended seve- 
rally in literary labour and in recreation, after the 
manner of statistical comparisons, it would be found 
that the largest portion of his hours was devoted to 
hard work in the seclusion of the study, and that by 
far the larger portion of the allotted " recreation " was 
devoted to reading, either in the study or in the society 
of his family. Those who knew him best will picture 
him to themselves clothed in a dressing-gown, and bend- 
ing his head over a book or over the desk. At some 
periods of his life he rose early, in order that he might 
get to work early ; in other periods he rose late, because 
he sat over the desk very late. For the most part, how- 
ever, he habitually came down " too late " to breakfast, 
and was no sooner seated sideways at the table than he 
began to read. After breakfast he repaired to his study, 



INTRODUCTION. ^\ vu 

where he remained until he went out to take his walk. 
He sometimes read at dinner, though not always. At 
some periods of his life he would sleep after dinner ; 
but usually he retired from the table to read. He read 
at tea time, and all the evening read or wrote. In early 
life his profession led him, as a critic, to the theatres, 
and the same employment took him there at later dates. 
In the earlier half of his existence he mixed somewhat 
in society, and his own house was noted, amongst a truly 
selected circle of friends, for the tasteful ease of its con- 
versation and recreation, music usually forming a staple 
in both the talk and the diversion. It was at this period 
of his life that his appearance was most characteristic, 
and none of the portraits of him adequately conveyed 
the idea of it. One of the best, a half-length chalk 
drawing, by an artist named Wildman, perished. The 
miniature by Severn was only a sketch on a small scale, 
but it suggested the kindness and animation of his 
countenance. In other cases, the artists knew too little 
of their sitter to catch the most familiar traits of his 
aspect. He was rather tall, as straight as an arrow, 
and looked slenderer than he really was. His hair was 
black and shining, and slightly inclined to wave; his 
head was high, his forehead straight and wdiite, his eyes 
black and sparkling, his general complexion dark. There 
was in his whole carriage and manner an extraordinary 
degree of life. Years and trouble had obscured that 
brilliancy when the drawing was made of which a copy 
is prefixed to the present volume ; but it is a faithful 
portrait, in which the reader will see much of the reflec- 
tion, the earnestness, and the affectionate thought that 
were such leading elements in his character. 

As life advanced, as his family increased faster than 
his means, his range of visiting became more contracted, 
his devotion to labour more continuous, and his friends 
reduced to the small number of those who came only to 



vm INTRODUCTION. 

steal for conversation the time that he otherwise would 
have given to his books. Such friends he welcomed 
heartily, and seldom allowed them to feel the tax which 
they made him pay for the time thus consumed. 

Even at seasons of the greatest depression in his for- 
tunes, he always attracted many visitors, but still not so 
much for any repute that attended him as for his personal 
qualities. Few men were more attractive " in society," 
whether in a large company or over the fireside. His 
manners were peculiarly animated; his conversation, 
varied, ranging over a great field of subjects, was moved 
and called forth by the response of his companion, be 
that companion philosopher or student, sage or boy, man 
or woman ; and he was equally ready for the most lively 
topics or for the gravest reflections — his expression easily 
adapting itself to the tone of his companion's mind. With 
much freedom of manners, he combined a spontaneous 
courtesy that never failed, and a considerateness derived 
from a ceaseless kindness of heart that invariably fasci- 
nated even strangers. In the course of his newspaper 
career, more than one enemy has come to his house with 
the determination to extort disavowals or to chastise, and 
has gone away with loud expressions of his personal 
esteem and liking. 

This tendency to seclusion in the study had a very 
large and serious influence upon Leigh Hunt's life. It 
arose, as we have seen, from no dislike to society ; on 
the contrary, from youth to his very latest days, he pre- 
ferred to have companions with him ; but it was necessary 
to be surrounded by his books. He used to ascribe this 
propensity to his two years' seclusion in prison ; and it 
is probable that that circumstance did contribute to fasten 
upon his character what must still have been an inborn 
tendency ; for it continued through all changes of posi- 
tion. His natural faculties conduced to make him 
regard all things that came before him chiefly from the 



INTRODUCTION. IX 

intellectual or imaginative point of view. He had no 
aptitude for material science, and always retained a very 
precarious grasp of mere dry facts ; which, indeed, in 
proportion as they tended to the material or the hard, 
he almost disliked : the result was, that he viewed all 
things as in a mirror, and chiefly as they were reflected 
in books or illuminated by literary commentary. 

It is a necessary consequence of such a habit of mind 
that he often failed to see realities directly as they were ; 
and a further result was, that false ideas which were 
industriously circulated of him, in the first instance by 
political enemies, were confirmed, or even strengthened, 
by false conceptions which he formed of himself, and 
did not conceal. At a very early date, he felt bound to 
avow his liberal opinions on the subject of religion : in 
those days it was a common and an easy retort for an 
opponent to insinuate, that the man who was not sound 
in the most important opinions of all, must be wicked 
at heart, and therefore immoral in conduct; and, 
accordingly, Leigh Hunt has been accused of lax 
morality in his personal life. To him the shocking part 
o£ these accusals lay in their uncharitableness, their 
disingenuousness, or their malignity. In reply, he 
pointed to the charity enjoined by the Divine Author 
of Christianity, and qualified even his antagonism to 
such charges by appeals to charitable constructions, and 
admissions of the foibles of human nature, which sug- 
gested that there might be some foundation of truth for 
the charge. He was accused of improvidence, and he 
admitted incapacities for computation in matters of 
money, or anything else, which sounded very like a 
reluctant confession. Stern critics discerned, in the plea- 
surable traits of his gayer poems, proofs of effeminacy 
and weakness ; and throughout Leigh Hunt's writings 
will be found admissions, or even spontaneous announce- 
ments, of personal timidity. If there were not numbers 



X IlsTSODTJCTION". 

disposed to accept the best construction of the man, it 
would be difficult indeed to make them easily under- 
stand how utterly unfounded are these apparent confir- 
mations and admissions. 

Such foibles as Leigh Hunt had lay altogether in 
different directions. In early life he had no very pro- 
found respect for appearances, but his conduct was 
guided by a rigour of propriety that might shame many 
of his accusers ; and in later life he entertained a 
growing respect for appearances from the sense of the 
mischief which misconstrued example might do. His 
so-called improvidence resulted partly from actual dis- 
appointment in professional undertakings, partly from 
a real incapacity to understand any subjects when they 
were reduced to figures, and partly also from a readiness 
of self-sacrifice, which w r as the less to be guessed by 
any who knew him, since he seldom alluded to it, and 
never, except in the vaguest and most unintelligible 
terms, hinted at its real nature or extent. His personal 
timidity was simply an intellectual hallucination, in some 
degree founded upon what he supposed ought to be the 
utterly unmoved feelings of "a brave man. 5 ' I have 
seen him in many situations calculated to try the nerves, 
and never saw him moved by personal fear. He has 
been in a carriage of which the horses ran away, and 
seemed only to enjoy the rapidity of the motion ; in 
fact, I believe he could scarcely present to his mind the 
chances of personal mischief that were before us. I 
have seen him threatened, more than once, by brutal 
and brawny rustics, whom he instantly approached w^ith 
an animated and convincing remonstrance. I have seen 
him in a carriage nearly carried away by a flooded 
river, his whole anxietj^ being centred in one of his 
children whom he thought to be more exposed than 
himself. I have seen him for weeks together, each hour 
of the day, in imminent danger of shipwreck, and never 



INTRODUCTION. XI 

observed the slightest solicitude, except for those about 
him. On the occasion which he mentions, when the 
drunken steward endangered our being run down by 
two large ships that passed us like vast clouds astern, 
the lanterns were relit and handed up by Leigh Hunt 
with the coolness of a practised seaman. But there 
ivas a species of fear which beset him in every situation 
of life — it was, lest he might not do quite what was 
right; lest some terrible evil should be inflicted upon 
somebody else; and this thought, if he reflected, did 
sometimes paralyse his action and provoke evident 
emotion. 

Perhaps the mastering trait in his character was a 
conscientiousness which was carried even to extremes. 
While he possessed the uncertain grasp of material 
facts which I have mentioned, and viewed things most 
distinctly when they were presented to his mind in the 
mirror of some abstraction, he never was able to rest 
with a final confidence in his own judgment. The 
anxiety to recognise the right of others, the tendency to 
* refine," which was noticed by an early school compa- 
nion, and the propensity to elaborate every thought, 
made him, along with the direct argument by which he 
sustained his own conviction, recognise and almost admit 
all that might be said on the opposite side. If, indeed, 
the facts upon which he had to rely had become matter 
of literary record, he would collect them with an un- 
wearied industry of research ; but in the action of life 
these resources did not always avail him ; and the ex- 
cessive anxiety to take into account all that might be 
advanced on every side, with the no less excessive wish 
to do what was right, to avoid every chance of wrong, 
and, if possible, to abstain from causing any pain, begot 
an uncertainty of purpose for which I can find no known 
prototype except in the character of Hamlet. 

The ultra-conscientiousness has affected even his 



XU INTRODUCTION. 

biography. With an unbounded frankness in speaking 
of himself, he soon paused in speaking of others, from 
the habit of questioning whether he had "any right" to 
do so ; and thus an habitual frankness was accompanied 
by an habitual and unconquerable reserve. His Autobio- 
graphy is characteristically pronounced in its silence. 
He has nowhere related the most obvious family inci- 
dents. The silence is broken almost in an inverse pro- 
portion to the intimacy of his relations. He scarcely 
mentions his own marriage ; excepting the faintest pos- 
sible allusions, the only one of his children to whom he 
alludes has been to a certain extent before the public ; 
and even where his personal friends gave him, in their 
own recognition by the public, the right to speak of them 
openly, he has faithfully used the right in the peculiar 
ratio which has been pointed out, — freely mentioning 
those with whom he held intercourse chiefly in literary 
matters or in society, sparingly those whose intercourse 
powerfully affected his own life. A conspicuous instance 
is afforded by the friend who ultimately became his suc- 
cessor in maintaining the general independence of the 
Examiner s who has placed in the library immortal con- 
tributions to the political history of the English Com- 
monwealth, who endeared himself to Leigh Hunt even 
less by most valuable and laborious services than by 
kindness of heart and generosity of mind, and who re- 
tained his strongly expressed affection to the last. It 
was not that he did not respond to the warmest affection 
which he could so well inspire ; but in proportion as it 
was strongly felt and personal he seemed to regard it as 
unfitted for public allusion. 

It would ill become a son gratuitously to reveal fC the 
faults " of his father ; though he himself taught me to 
speak out the truth as I believe it. If I differ with him, 
it is in not being ready to see "faults " in any character, 
since I know of no abstract or ideal measure by which 



INTRODUCTION. Xlll 

the shortcoming could be established. But in his case 
it is most desirable that his qualities should be known 
as they were; for such deficiencies as he had are the 
honest explanation of his mistakes ; while, as the reader 
may see from his writing and his conduct, they are not, 
as the faults of which he was accused would be, incom- 
patible with the noblest faculties both of head and heart. 
To know Leigh Hunt as he was, was to hold him in 
reverence and love. 

The likeness to Hamlet was not lost even in a sort of 
aggressive conscientiousness. It affected his appreciation 
of character, which w r as, of course, modified also by the 
oblique sense of facts. Hence, some incidents in his 
life which had the most serious consequences to others, 
and therefore to himself. When he first became ac- 
quainted with a new friend whom he liked, he noticed 
with all his vivacity of ready and intense admiration 
the traits which he thought to be chiefly prominent in 
the aspect and bearing of the other ; constructed a cha- 
racter infer enti ally, and esteemed his friend accordingly. 
This constructive appreciation w T ould survive the test of 
years. Then he would discover that in regard to some 
quality or other which he had ascribed to his friend " he 
was mistaken ;" the whole conception of the admired 
character at once fell to the ground ; and his own dis- 
appointment recoiled with bitterness and grief on the 
perplexed and grieved friend. He never knew the pain 
he thus caused to some of the most loving hearts, which 
continued unchanged to him. 

If, indeed, he knew it, the simple knowledge was 
enough to cure the evil. No man ever lived who was 
more prepared to make thorough work with the practice 
of his own precepts — and his precepts were always 
noble in their spirit, charitable in their construction. 
No injury done to him, however inexcusable, however 
unceasing, or however painful in its consequences, could 



Xiv INTRODUCTION. 

exhaust his power of forgiveness. His animation, his 
sympathy with w T hat was gay and pleasurable, his 
avowed doctrine of cultivating cheerfulness, were mani- 
fest on the surface, and could be appreciated by those 
who knew him in society, most probably even exagge- 
rated as salient traits, on which he himself insisted with 
a sort of gay and ostentatious wilfulness. In the spirit 
which made him disposed to enjoy "anything that 
w T as going forward," he would even assume for the 
evening a convivial aspect, and urge a liberal mea- 
sure of the wine with the gnsto of a hon vivant. Few 
that knew him so could be aware, not only of the 
simple and uncostly sources from w r hich he habitually 
drew his enjoyments, but of his singularly plain life, 
extended even to a rule of self-denial. Excepting 
at intervals when wine was recommended to him, or 
came to him as a gift of friendship, his customary 
drink was water, which he would drink with the almost 
daily repetition of Dr. Armstrong's line, " Nought like 
the simple element dilutes." For, a trick of playing 
with a certain round of quotations was among the traits 
of his character most conspicuous even to casual visitors. 
In the routine of life, it may be said, he almost thought 
in a slang of the library. His dress was always plain 
and studiously economical. He would excuse the ex- 
treme plainness of his diet, by ascribing it to a deli- 
cacy of health, which he overrated. His food was often 
nothing but bread and meat at dinner, bread and tea 
for two meals of the day, bread alone for luncheon or 
for supper. His liberal constructions were shown to 
others, his strictness to himself. If he heard that a 
friend was in trouble, his house was offered as a 
" home ;" and it was literally so, many times in his life. 
Sometimes this generosity was repaid with outrageous 
ingratitude — with scandal-mongering, and even calum- 
nious inventions : he excused the wrong, as the eonse- 



INTRODUCTION. 



quence of deficient sense, of early training, or of 
congenital fault ; " for," he would remark, « it is im- 
possible to say what share, now, X.'s father and mother 
may have had in his doing so, or wdiat ancestor of X.'s 
may not have been really the author of my suffering — 
and his." When he was once reminded of his sacrifices 
for others, he answered, as if it dismissed the subject, 
r It was only for my own relations ;" but his memory 
deceived him extravagantly. It was not that his kind- 
ness was undiscriminating ; for he " drew the line" with 
much clearness between what he "could" do for the 
mere sake of helping the unfortunate, and the willing- 
ness to share whatever he might have with those he 
really esteemed and loved — not a few. The tenderness 
of his affection was excessive : it disarmed some of the 
most reckless ; it made him throw a veil of impenetrable 
reserve over weaknesses of others, from which he suf- 
fered in ways most calculated to mortify and pain him, 
but w r hich he suffered with never-failing kindness, and 
with silence absolutely unbroken. 

It must not be supposed, however, that with all his 
disposition to refine, his love of the pleasurable, and his 
tenderness, he w^as a mere easy sentimentalist. If he 
may be compared to Hamlet, it was Hamlet budding 
himself to hard work, and performing with vigour and 
conscientious completeness. Seldom have writers so 
conscientiously verified all their statements of fact. His 
constant industry has been mentioned : he could work 
from early morning till far into midnight, every day, for 
months together ; and he had been a hard-working man 
all his life. For the greater part, even his recreation was 
auxiliary to his work. He had thus acquired a know- 
ledge of authorities most unusual, and had heaps of 
information " at his fingers' ends ;" yet he habitually 
verified even what he knew already, though it should be 
only for some parenthetical use. No tenderness could 



XVI INTRODUCTION. 

shake him from sternly rebuking or opposing where 
duty bade him do so : and for a principle he was pre- 
pared to sacrifice everything, as he had sacrificed money 
and liberty. For all his excessive desire not to with- 
hold his sympathy, not to hurt others' feelings, or not 
to overlook any possible excuse for infirmity, moral as 
w T ell as physical, he never paltered with his own sin- 
cerity. He never swerved from what he believed to be 
the truth. 

In the course of his long life as a public writer, 
political and polemical animosities died away, and were 
succeeded by a broader recognition of common purposes 
and common endeavours, to which he had not a little 
contributed. Although some strange misconceptions of 
Leigh Hunt's character still remained, — strange, though, 
as we have seen, not difficult to explain, — the acknow- 
ment of his genuine qualities had widely extended. 
There had been great changes, some liberals had become 
conservative, more conservatives had become liberal, 
all had become less dogmatic and uncharitable. His 
personal friendships embraced every party ; but through 
all, the spirit of his opinions, the qualities of his cha- 
racter, the unweariedness of his industry, continued the 
same. To promote the happiness of his kind, to minister 
to the more educated appreciation of order and beauty, 
to open more widely the door of the library, and more 
widely the window of the library looking out upon 
nature, — these were the purposes that guided his studies 
and animated his labour to the very last. 



AUTOBIOGBAPHY Of LEIGH HUNT. 



CHAPTER I. 
THE AUTHOR'S PEOGENITOES. 






The circumstances that led to this Autobiography will tran* 
spire in the course of it. Suffice it to say for the present, 
that a more involuntary production it would be difficult to 
conceive ; though I trust it will not be found destitute of 
the entertainment which any true account of experiences in 
the life of a human being must of necessity, perhaps, contain. 

I claim no importance for anything which I have done or 
undergone, but on grounds common to the interests of all, 
and to the willing sympathy of my brother-lovers of books. 
Should I be led at any time into egotisms of a nature that 
make me seem to think otherwise, I blush beforehand for the 
mischance, and beg it to be considered as alien from my 
habits of reflection. I have had vanities enough in my day ; 
and, as the reader will see, became aware of them. If I have 
any remaining, I hope they are only such as nature kindly 
allows to most of us, in order to comfort us in our regrets and 
infirmities. And the more we could look even into these, the 
less ground we should find in them for self-complacency, apart 
from considerations that respect the whole human race. 

There is a phrase, for instance, of " fetching a man's mind 
from his cradle." But does the mind begin at that point of 
time? Does it begin even with his parents ? I was looking 
once, in company with Mr. Hazlitt, at an exhibition of pic- 
tures in the British Institution, when casting my eyes on the 
portrait of an officer in the dress of the time of Charles the 
Second, I exclaimed, " What a likeness to Basil Montagu ! " 
(a friend of ours). It turned out to be his ancestor, Lord 
Sandwich. Mr. Hazlitt took me across the room, and showed 

1 



2 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUN?. 

me the portrait of a celebrated judge, who lived at the same 
period. " This," said he, " is Judge So-and-so; and his 
living representative (he is now dead) has the same face and 
the same passions." The Hazlitt then of the same age might 
have been the same Hazlitt that was standing with me before 
the picture ; and the same may have been the case with the 
writer of these pages. There is a famous historical bit of 
transmission called the * Austrian lip ;" and faces, which we 
consider peculiar to individuals, are said to be common in 
districts : such as the Boccaccio face in one part of Tuscany, 
and the Dante face in another. I myself have seen, in the 
Genoese territory, which is not far from Corsica, many a face 
like that of the Bonapartes; and where a race has strong 
blood in it, or whatever may constitute the requisite vital 
tendency, it is probable that the family likeness might 
be found to prevail in the humblest as well as highest 
quarters. There are families, indeed, of yeomen, which are 
said to have flourished like oaks, in one and the same spot, 
since the times of the Anglo-Saxons. I am descended, both 
by father's and mother's side, from adventurous people, who 
left England for the New World, and whose descendants have 
retained the spirit of adventure to this day. The chances are, 
that in some respects I am identical with some half-dozen, or 
perhaps twenty of these ; and that the mind of some cavalier 
of the days of the Stuarts, or some gentleman or yeoman, or 
" roving blade," of those of the Edwards and Henrys — per- 
haps the gallant merchant-man, " Henry Hunt " of the old 
ballad — mixed, alas ! with a sedentary difference — is now 
writing these lines, ignorant of his former earthly self and of 
his present ! I say earthly, for I speak it with no disparage- 
ment to the existence of an individual " soul " — a point in 
which I am a firm believer ; nor would it be difficult to 
reconcile one opinion with the other, in ears accustomed to 
such arguments ; but I must not enter upon them here.* 

* " Then Henrye Hunt, with vigour hott, 
Came bravely on the other side, 
Soon he drove downe his foremast tree, 

(Sir Andrew Barton's, to wit) 
And killed fourscore men beside. 
'Nowe, out alas! ' Sir Andrewe cryed, 

* What may a man now think, or say? 
Yonder merchant theefe, that pierceth mee, 
He was my prisoner yesterday.' ° 
Ballad of Sir Andrew Barton^ in Percy's lieliques, vol. 2. 

[Barton 



THE author's progenitors. 3 

The name of Hunt is found among the gentry, but I suspect 
it is oftener a plebeian name. Indeed it must be so, like 
almost all others, from the superabundance of population on 
the plebeian side. But it has also a superabundance of its 
own ; for in the list of sixty of the commonest names in 
England, given by Mr. Lower in his Essay on Family Nomen- 
clature^ it stands fifty-fourth. On the other hand, offsets from 
aristocratic trees wander into such remote branches, that the 
same name is found among those of the few families that have 
a right to quarter the royal arms. I should be very proud to 
be discovered to be a nine hundred and fiftieth cousin of 
Queen Victoria ; the more so, inasmuch as I could, patiently 
enough, have let the claim lie dormant in the case of some of 
her Majesty's predecessors. My immediate progenitors were 
clergymen ; and Bryan Edwards's History of the West Indies 
contains a map of Barbados (their native place) with one of 
the residences designated by it — apparently a minor estate — 
yet the name of Hunt does not appear either in the old map 
in the History of Barbados by Ligon, or in the lists of 
influential or other persons in that by Sir Robert Schom- 
burgck. There is a " Richard Hunt, Esq." in the list of 
subscribers to Hughes's Natural History of Barbados, which 
contains also the name of Dr. Hunt, who was Hebrew and 
Arabic professor at Oxford, and whose genealogy the bio- 
grapher cannot discover. Perhaps the good old oriental 
scholar belongs to our stock, and originated my love of 
the Arabian Nights ! The tradition in the family is that 
we descend from Tory cavaliers (a wide designation), who 
fled to the West Indies from the ascendancy of Cromwell ; 
and on a female side, amidst a curious mixture of quakers and 
soldiers, we derive ourselves not only from gentry, but from 
kings — that is to say, Irish kings ! — personages (not to say 
it disrespectfully to the wit and misfortunes of the sister- 
island) who rank pretty much on a par with the negro chief, 
surrounded by half a dozen lords in ragged shirts, who asked 

Barton, a kind of u Scottish rover on the seas " (as the ballad calls 
him), worried the English navigation in the time of Henry the Eighth, 
and was killed in the engagement here noticed, in which the two ships 
under his command were captured by two English ships under the 
command of Sir Thomas and Sir Edward Howard. Hunt was cap- 
tain of a merchantman, of Newcastle, which traded to Bordeaux, 
and which had been one of Barton's prizes. I hope the gallant 
seaman's Bordeaux claret was ancestor of that which my progenitors 
drank in Barbados. 

1—2 



4 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

the traveller what his brother kings thought of him in 
Europe. A learned and friendly investigator into the matter 
thinks the Cromwell tradition a mistake, and brings us from 
a clergyman of the name of Isaac Hunt (my father's name), 
who left Exeter for Barbados in the time of James the First. 
He connects us also with a partner in the mercantile firm of 
Hunt and Lascelles in that island, one of which latter persons 
came into England during the first half of the last century, 
and gave rise to the noble family of Harewood. In the 
British Museum is a manuscript journal that was kept in 
this year by a Hunt of the same Christian name of Isaac. 
I take our paternal family >stock to have been divided for 
many generations between the clerical and mercantile pro- 
fessions. 

The etymology, however, of the name is obvious ; and very 
unfit does it render it for its present owners. The pastime in 
which their Saxon ancestors may have excelled, so as to derive 
from it their very appellation, is contrary to the principles of 
their descendants ! But hunting was not merely a pastime 
in old Saxon days. It was a business and a necessity; there 
were children to feed, and wild beasts to be exterminated. 
Besides, one must share and share alike in the reputation of 
one's fellow-creatures. I dare say the Hunts were as ferocious 
in those days as their name may have implied. They have 
since hunted in other ways, not always without a spice of 
fierceness ; and smarting have been the wounds which they 
have both given and taken. 

[The more probable etymology of the name traces it to the 
geographical use of the word, designating a district used for 
the chase. The tradition of Irish kings has probably been 
introduced by a very doubtful connection with the Hunts of 
Ireland, who have changed their name for that of De Vere, 
which they also claim by inheritance. One of the family, in 
a jocular way, claimed cousinship with Leigh Hunt ; but if 
any relationship existed, it must have been before either 
family left England for Barbados, or for Ireland. The Bickleys, 
mentioned subsequently, were not of Irish origin, though Sir 
William served in Ireland. The Hunts of Barbados were 
among the very earliest settlers, and the name may be seen in 
a list published in Barbados in 1612 ; but it is testimony 
from which the autobiographer probably shrunk with dislike, 
for it is an old list, perhaps the oldest existing list, of negro 
slave- owners. There is reason to believe that members of the 



to 



THE author's progenitors. 5 

family revisited their native country in the course of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.] 

I have begun my book with my progenitors and with child- 
hood, partly because " order gives all things view," partly 
because, whatever we may assume as we grow up respecting 
the " dignity of manhood," we all feel that childhood was a 
period of great importance to us. Most men recur to it with 
delight. They are in general very willing to dilate upon it, 
especially if they meet with an old schoolfellow; and there- 
fore, on a principle of reciprocity, and as I have long con- 
sidered myself a kind of playmate and fellow-disciple with 
persons of all times of life (for none of us, unless we are very 
silly or naughty boys indeed, ever leave off learning in some 
school or other), I shall suppose I have been listening to some 
other young gentleman of sixty or seventy years of age over 
his wine, and that I am now going to relate about half as 
much respecting my existence as he has told us of his 
own. 

My grandfather, himself the son, I believe, of a clergyman, 
was Rector of St. Michael's, in Bridge Town, Barbados. He 
was a good-natured man, and recommended the famous 
Lauder to the mastership of the free school there; influenced, 
no doubt, partly by his pretended repentance, and partly by 
sympathy with his Toryism. Lauder is said to have been 
discharged for misconduct. I never heard that ; but I have 
heard that his appearance was decent, and that he had a 
wooden leg: which is an anti-climax befitting his history.* My 

* Since writing this passage, I find a more serious conclusion to 
his history in a book entitled Creoliana ; or, Social and Domestic Scenes 
and Incidents in Barbados in Days of Yore, by J. W. Orderson. He is 
there said to have failed in his school ; and to have set up a huckster's 
shop with the aid of an African woman whom he had purchased. 
After behaviour to a daughter by this woman which cannot be de- 
scribed, and her repulses of which he resented by ordering her to be 
scourged, he sold her to a naval captain, who rescued her from the 
infliction. 

Let us hope that Lauder would have denied the paternity imputed 
to him. Perhaps, indeed, he would have denied more, or did deny it; 
for his answer of the charges yet remains to be heard. The poor girl 
afterwards became the fat and flourishing landlady of an hotel ; and 
is famous in Barbadian and nautical annals for having successfully 
drawn up a bill of damages to the amount of seven hundred pounds 
against his Royal Highness Prince William Henry, afterwards Duke 
of Clarence and King William the Fourth, who in a fit of ultra- 
joviality with the mess of the Forty-ninth Regiment, demolished all 



6 ATITOBIOGBAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

grandfather was admired and beloved by his parishioners for 
the manner in which he discharged his duties. He died at an 
early age, in consequence of a fever taken in the hot and 
damp air, while officiating incessantly at burials during a 
mortality. His wife, who was an O'Brien, or rather Bryan, 
very proud of her descent from the kings aforesaid (or of the 
kings from her), was as good-natured and beloved as her 
husband, and very assiduous in her attentions to the negroes 
and to the poor, for whom she kept a set of medicines, like 
my Lady Bountiful. They had two children besides my 
father : Ann Courthope, who died unmarried ; and Eliza- 
beth, wife of Thomas Dayrell, Esq-., of Barbados, one of 
the family of the Dayrells of Lillingstone, and father by a 
first marriage of the late barrister of that name. I men- 
tion both of these ladies, because they will come among my 
portraits. 

To these their children, the worthy Eector and his wife 
w^ere a little too indulgent. When my father was to go to the 
American continent to school, the latter dressed up her boy 
in a fine suit of laced clothes, such as we see on the little gen- 
tlemen in Hogarth ; but so splendid and costly, that when the 
good pastor beheld him, he was moved to utter an expostula- 
tion. Objection, however, soon gave way before the pride of 
all parties ; and my father set off for school, ready spoilt, with 
plenty of money to spoil him more. 

He went to college at Philadelphia, and became the scape- 
grace who smuggled in the wine, and bore the brunt of the 
tutors. My father took the degree of Master of Arts, both at 
Philadelphia and New York. When he spoke the farewell 
oration on leaving college, two young ladies fell in love with 
him, one of whom he afterwards married. He was fair and 
handsome, with delicate features, a small aquiline nose, and 
blue eyes. To a graceful address he joined a remarkably fine 
voice, which he modulated with great effect. It was in read- 
ing, with this voice, the poets and other classics of England, 
that he completed the conquest of my mother's heart. He 
used to spend the evenings in this manner with her and her 
family, — a noble way of courtship ; and my grandmother 
became so hearty in his cause, that she succeeded in carrying 

the furniture in her house, to the very beds ; the cunning hostess 
(whom he upset as he went away) refusing to interfere with the 
vivacities of " Massa, the King's son," which she prudently concluded 
he would pay for like a gentleman. 



THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 7 

it against her husband, who wished his daughter to marry a 
wealthy neighbour. [The bride was Mary, the daughter of 
Stephen She well, a merchant of Philadelphia, a vehement 
man, both in public and in family matters. The other lady 
was Mary's aunt, although the girls were about the same 
age.] 

My father was intended, I believe, to carry on the race of 
clergymen, as he afterwards did ; but he went, in the first 
instance, into the law. The Americans united the practice of 
attorney and barrister. My father studied the law under 
articles to one of the chief persons in the profession; and 
afterwards practised with distinction himself. At this period 
(by which time all my brothers except one were born) the 
devolution broke out ; and he entered with so much zeal into 
the cause of the British Government, that, besides pleading 
for loyalists with great fervour at the bar, he wrote pamphlets 
equally full of party warmth, which drew on him the popular 
odium. His fortunes then came to a crisis in America. Early 
one morning, a great concourse of people appeared before his 
house. He came out, — or was brought. They put him into 
a cart prepared for the purpose (conceive the anxiety of his 
wife !), and, after parading him about the streets, were joined 
by a party of the revolutionary soldiers with drum and fife. 
The multitude, some days before, for the same purpose, had 
seized Dr. Kearsley, a staunch Tory, who on learning their 
intention had shut up the windows of his house, and endea- 
voured to prevent their getting in. The doctor had his hand 
pierced by a bayonet, as it entered between the shutters 
behind which he had planted himself. He was dragged out 
and put into the cart, dripping with blood ; but he lost none 
of his intrepidity ; for he answered their reproaches and out- 
rage with vehement reprehensions ; and, by way of retaliation 
on the " Rogue's March," struck up " God save the King." 
My father, who knew Kearsley, had endeavoured to persuade 
him not to add to their irritation ; but to no purpose. The 
doctor continued infuriate, and more than once fainted from 
loss of blood and the violence of his feelings. My father 
comparatively softened the people with his gentler manners ; 
yet he is understood, like Kearsley, to have had a narrow 
escape from tarring and feathering. A tub of tar, which had 
been set in a conspicuous place in one of the streets for that 
purpose, was overturned by an officer intimate with our family. 
The well-bred loyalist ? however, did not escape entirely from 



8 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

personal injury. One of the stones thrown by the mob gave 
him such a severe blow on the head, as not only laid him 
swooning in the cart, but dimmed his sight for life. At length, 
after being carried through every street in Philadelphia, he 
was deposited, as Dr. Kearsley had been, in a prison in 
Market Street. The poor doctor went out of his mind, and 
ended his days not long afterwards in confinement.* My 
father, by means of a large sum of money given to the sen- 
tinel who had charge of him, was enabled to escape at 
midnight. He went immediately on board a ship in the 
Delaware, that belonged to my grandfather, and was bound 
for the West Indies. She dropped down the river that same 
night ; and my father went first to Barbados, and afterwards 
to England, where he settled. 

My mother was to follow my father as soon as possible, 
which she was not able to do for many months. The last time 
she had seen him, he was a lawyer and a partisan, going out 
to meet an irritated populace. On her arrival in England, she 
beheld him in a pulpit, a clergyman, preaching tranquillity. 
When my father came over, he found it impossible to continue 
his profession as a lawyer. Some actors, who heard him read, 
advised him to go on the stage ; but he was too proud for that, 
and he went into the Church. He was ordained by the cele- 
brated Lowth, then Bishop of London ; and he soon became 
so popular that the Bishop sent for him and remonstrated 
against his preaching so many charity sermons. His lordship 
said that it was ostentatious in a clergyman, and that he saw 
his name in too many advertisements. My father thought it 
strange, but acquiesced. It is true he preached a great many 
of these sermons. I am told that for a whole year he did 
nothing else ; and perhaps there was something in his manner 
a little startling to the simplicity of the Church of England. 
I remember, when he came to that part of the Litany where 

* I learn this particular respecting Dr. Kearsley from an amusing 
and interesting book, entitled Memoirs of a Life chiefly passed in 
Pennsylvania, the anonymous author of which is understood to have 
been a Captain Graddon, or Graydon, an officer in the American 
service. The same work has occasioned me to represent the treat- 
ments of Kearsley and my father as occurring on two distinct days, 
instead of simultaneously, as in the family tradition, the Captain 
informing us that he Avas an eye-witness of both. 

There appears to have been something constitutionally wild in the 
temperament of Kearsley. The Captain describes him as having 
ridden once, during a midnight frolic, into the parlour of a lodging- 
house, mounted on horseback, and even up the stairs I 



THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 9 

the reader prays for his deliverance " in the hour of death 
and at the day of judgment," he used to make a pause at the 
word " death," and drop his voice on the rest of the sentence. 
The effect was striking ; but the repetition must have hurt it. 
I am afraid it was a little theatrical. His delivery, however, 
was so much admired by those who thought themselves the 
best judges, that Thomas Sheridan, father of the celebrated 
Sheridan, came up to him one day, after service, in the vestry, 
and complimented him on having profited so well from his 
Treatise on Reading the Liturgy. My father was obliged to 
tell him that he had never seen it. 

I do not know whether it was Lowth, but it was some 
bishop, to whom my father one day, in the midst of a warm 
discussion, being asked, " Do you know who I am ?" replied, 
with a bow, " Yes, my lord ; dust and ashes." Doubtless the 
clergyman was warm and imprudent. In truth, he made a 
great mistake when he entered the profession. By the nature 
of the tenure, it was irretrievable ; and his whole life after 
was a series of errors, arising from the unsuitability of his 
position. He was fond of divinity ; but it was as a specu- 
lator, not as a dogmatist, or one who takes upon trust. He 
was ardent in the cause of Church and State ; but here he 
speculated too, and soon began to modify his opinions, which 
got him the ill-will of the Government. He delighted his 
audiences in the pulpit ; so much so, that he had crowds of 
carriages at the door. One of his congregations had an en- 
graving made of him ; and a lady of the name of Cooling, 
who was member of another, left him by will the sum of 500Z., 
as a testimony of the pleasure and advantage she had derived 
from his discourses. 

But unfortunately, after delighting his hearers in the pulpit, 
he would delight some of them a little too much over the 
table. He was extremely lively and agreeable ; was full of 
generous sentiments ; could flatter without grossness ; had 
stories to tell of lords whom he knew ; and when the bottle 
was to circulate, it did not stand with him. All this was 
dangerous to a West Indian who had an increasing family, 
and who was to make his way in the Church. It was too 
much for him ; and he added another to the list of those who, 
though they might suffice equally for themselves and others in 
a more considerate and contented state of society, and seem 
to be the born delights of it, are only lost and thrown out in 
a system of things which, by going upon the ground of indi- 



10 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. 

victual aggrandizement, compels dispositions of a more sociable 
and reasonable nature either to become parties concerned, or 
be ruined in the refusal. It is doubtless incumbent on a 
husband and father to be careful under all circumstances : 
and it is easy for most people to talk of the necessity of being 
so, and to recommend it to others, especially when they have 
been educated to the habit. Let those fling the first stone 
who, with the real inclination and talent for other things (for 
the inclination may not be what they take it for), confine 
themselves industriously to the duties prescribed them. There 
are more victims to errors committed by society itself than 
society supposes. 

But I grant that a man is either bound to tell society so, or 
to do as others do. My father was always zealous, theo- 
retically speaking, both for the good of the world, and for that 
of his family (I remember a printed proposal which he drew 
up for an academy, to be entitled the " Cosmopolitical Semi- 
nary ") ; but he had neither uneasiness enough in his blood, 
nor, perhaps, sufficient strength in his convictions, to bring his 
speculations to bear ; and as to the pride of cutting a figure 
above his neighbours, which so many men mistake for a better 
principle of action, he could dispense with that. As it was, 
he should have been kept at home in Barbados. He was a 
true exotic, and ought not to have been transplanted. He 
might have preached there, and quoted Horace, and been gen- 
tlemanly and generous, and drunk his claret, and no harm 
done. But in a bustling, commercial state of society, where 
the enjoyment, such as it is, consists in the bustle, he was 
neither very likely to succeed, nor to meet with a good con- 
struction, nor to end his pleasant ways with pleasing either 
the world or himself. 

It was in the pulpit of Bentinck Chapel, Lisson Green, 
Pacldington, that my mother found her husband officiating. 
He published a volume of sermons preached there, in which 
there is little but elegance of diction and a graceful morality. 
His delivery was the charm ; and, to say the truth, he charmed 
everybody but the owner of the chapel, who looked upon rent 
as by far the most eloquent production of the pulpit. The 
speculation ended with the preacher being horribly in debt. 
Friends, however, were lavish of their assistance. Three of my 
brothers were sent to school ; the other, at her earnest entreaty 
went to live (which he did for some years) with Mrs. Spencer, 
a sister (I think) of Sir Richard Worsley, and a delicious little 



THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 11 

old woman, the delight of all the children of her acquaintance. 
She occupied at one time a small house which belonged to her 
in the Paddington Road, and in the front garden of which, or 
in that of the house next to it (I forget which, but they were 
both her property), stood a beautiful almond-tree, not long 
since cut down. Never shall I forget the enchanting effect 
which the bright green rails of the gardens of these houses 
used to have upon me when I caught sight of them in going 
there with my mother. My father and mother took breath, 
in the meantime, under the friendly roof of Mr. West, the 
painter, who had married her aunt. The aunt and niece were 
much of an age, and both fond of books. Mrs. West, indeed, 
ultimately became a martyr to them ; for the physician de- 
clared that she lost the use of her limbs by sitting in-doors. 

From Newman Street my father went to live in Hampstead 
Square, whence he occasionally used to go and preach at 
Southgate. The then Duke of Chandos had a seat in the 
neighbourhood of Southgate. He heard my father preach, 
and was so pleased with him, that he requested him to become 
tutor to his nephew, Mr. Leigh, which the preacher did, and 
he remained with his Grace's family for several years. The 
Duke was Master of the Horse, and originated the famous 
epithet of " heaven-born minister," applied to Mr. Pitt. I 
have heard my father describe him as a man of great sweet- 
ness of nature and good breeding. He was the grandson of 
Pope and Swift's Duke of Chandos. He died in 1789, and 
left a widow, who survived him for several years in a state of 
mental alienation. I mention this circumstance, because I 
think I have heard it said in our family, that her derange- 
ment was owing to a piece of thoughtlessness, the notice of 
which may serve as a caution. She was a woman of great 
animal spirits ; and happening to thrust aside the Duke's chair 
when he was going to sit down, the consequences were such, 
that being extremely attached to him, she could never forgive 
herself, but lost her husband and senses at once. The Duchess 
had already been married to a gentleman of the name of 
Elletson. She was daughter of Sir Eichard Gamon, and 
mother of an heiress, who carried the title of Chandos into 
the Grenville family. 

To be tutor in a ducal family is one of the roads to a 
bishopric. My father was thought to be in the highest way 
to it. He was tutor in the house, not only of a duke, but of 
a state officer, for whom the King had a personal regard. His 



12 AUTOBIOQEAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

manners were of the highest order ; his principles in Church 
and State as orthodox, to all appearance, as could be wished ; 
and he had given up flourishing prospects in America for 
their sake. But the same ardent and disinterested sense of 
right which induced him to make that sacrifice in behalf of 
what he thought due to his Sovereign, made him no less ready 
to take the part of any one holding opposite opinions whom 
he considered to be ill-used ; and he had scarcely set his foot 
in England, when he so distinguished himself among his bro- 
ther loyalists for his zeal in behalf of a fellow-countryman 
who had served in the republican armies, that he was given 
to understand it was doing him no service at court. 

This gentleman was the distinguished American artist, 
Colonel Trumbull. Mr. Trumbull, at that time a young man, 
had left the army to become a painter; to which end he had 
crossed the Atlantic, and was studying under Mr. West. The 
Government, suspecting him to be a spy, arrested him, and it 
was not without exertions extremely creditable to Mr. West 
himself, as well as to my father (for the future President of 
the Academy was then commencing his own career under 
regal patronage), that the supposed dangerous ex-officer was 
set free. Mr. Trumbull, in his memoirs, has recorded his 
obligations to both. Those on the part of my father, as a 
loyalist, he pronounces to have been not only perilous but 
unique. He says, in a letter to his father, Governor Trum- 
bull :— 

" Mr. West, who has been very much my friend, spoke 
immediately both to the King and the American secretary, 
and was encouraged by both to expect that as soon as the 
noise should have subsided a little I should be discharged. 
However, after waiting two months, I wrote to Lord George 
Germaine, but received no answer. Mr. West, at the same 
time, could not obtain a second interview with him. In Feb- 
ruary, a Mr. Hunt, a refugee from Philadelphia, formerly an 
assistant to Mr. West " (this is a mistake, my father never 
had anything to do with painting), " conversing with Mr. West 
on the subject, was so far convinced of the absurdity and in- 
justice of the treatment I had received, that he entered warmly 
into my interest, and with great perseverance urged the other 
refugees to assist him in undeceiving the ministry, and gain- 
ing my discharge. Not one, however, joined him ; and after 
a fortnight's solicitation, he was told by Mr. Thompson, Lord 
George Germaine's secretary, a Woburn lad, that he made 



THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 13 

himself very busy in this affair, and very little to his own 
reputation ; that he had best stop, for all his applications in 
my behalf were useless."* 

And again, in the Appendix to the same work, page 319 : — 

" I had little left to hope, unless from some favourable turn 
of affairs in America. An effort indeed was made through. 
Mr. Hunt, a refugee from Philadelphia, upon the feelings of 
his fellows, which does honour to him, and was pushed so far 
as almost to endanger his own safety, but without any other 
effect than showing the detestable rancour which, with very 
few exceptions, is the common mark of their character." 

Mr. Trumbull's opinion of the loyalists in general must be 
taken cum grano ; for though he appears to have been an esti- 
mable, he was also an irritable, man ; but this does not dimi- 
nish the honour due to my father's efforts. There can be 
little doubt, however, that those efforts did him mischief with 
the King, who, not knowing him so well as he did Mr. West, 
being naturally given to dislike those who in any respect dif- 
fered with him, and probably having been made acquainted 
with some indiscreet evidence of warmth in the prosecution of 
his endeavours for Mr. Trumbull, is very likely to have con- 
ceived an impression of him unfavourable to the future clergy- 
man. I know not how soon, too, but most likely before long, 
my father, as he became acquainted with the Government, 
began to doubt its perfections ; and the King, whose minute- 
ness of information respecting the personal affairs of his sub- 
jects is well known, was most likely prepared with questions, 
which the Duke of Chandos was not equally prepared to 
answer. 

Meanwhile, the honest loyalist was getting more and more 
distressed. He removed to Hampstead a second time : from 
Hampstead he crossed the water ; and the first room I have 
any recollection of is one in a prison. It was in the King's 
Bench. Here was the game of rackets, giving the place a 
strange lively air in the midst of its distresses ; here I first 
heard, to my astonishment and horror, a verse of a song, sung 
out, as he tottered along, by a drunken man, the words of 
which appeared to me unspeakably wicked : and here I re- 
member well, as he walked up and down, the appearance of a 

* Autobiography, Reminiscences, and Letters of John Trumbull, from 
1756 to 1841. New York and London, 1841. The Thompson 'here 
contemptuously mentioned as "a Woburn lad," was afterwards the 
celebrated Count Rumford. 



14 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

prisoner who was at that time making no little noise in the 
world, and who was veritably wicked enough. He was a tall 
thin man, in a cocked hat, had an aquiline nose, and altoge- 
ther appeared to my childish eyes a strangely inconsistent- 
looking person for a man of his character, and much of a 
gentleman. I have an impression on my memory that I was 
told he had run a needle through his wife's tongue. This was 
Andrew Eobinson Stoney Bowes, Esq., which last name he 
had assumed on his marriage with the Countess of Strath- 
more, for cruel treatment of whom in his attempt to extort 
her property he had been sentenced to an imprisonment of 
three years. His surgeon and biographer, Jesse Foot, in 
summing up his character, says of him, that he was u cow- 
ardly, insidious, hypocritical, tyrannic, mean, violent, selfish, 
deceitful, jealous, revengeful, inhuman, and savage, without a 
single countervailing quality." It is not improbable that Mr. 
Foot might have been one of the persons he deceived; but 
the known events of the man's life really go far to make him 
out this kind of monster ; and Foot suppresses most of the 
particulars of his cruelty as too shocking to detail. He was 
one of those madmen who are too conventionally sane to be 
locked up, but who appear to be born what they are by some 
accident of nature. 

Mr. West took the liberty of representing my father's cir- 
cumstances to the king. It is well known that this artist 
enjoyed the confidence of his Majesty in no ordinary degree. 
The king would converse half a day at a time with him, while 
he was painting. His Majesty said he would speak to the 
bishops ; and again, on a second application, he said my father 
should be provided for. My father himself also presented a 
petition ; but all that was ever done for him, was the putting 
his name on the Loyalist Pension List for a hundred a year, 
— a sum which he not only thought extremely inadequate for 
the loss of seven or eight times as much in America, a cheaper 
country, but which he felt to be a poor acknowledgment even 
for the active zeal which he had evinced, and the things which 
he had said and written ; especially as the pension came late, 
and his circumstances were already involved. Small as it 
was, he was obliged to mortgage it ; and from this time till 
the arrival of some relations from the West Indies, several 
years afterwards, he underwent a series of mortifications and 
distresses, not always without reason for self-reproach. Un- 
fortunately for others, it might be said of him, what Lady 



THE AUTHOR'S progenitors. 15 

Mary Wortley said of her kinsman, Henry Fielding, " that 
give him his leg of mutton and bottle of wine, and in the 
very thick of calamity he would be happy for the time being." 
Too well able to seize a passing moment of enjoyment, he 
was always scheming, never performing ; always looking for- 
ward with some romantic plan which w r as sure to succeed, and 
never put in practice. I believe he wrote more titles of non- 
existing books than Eabelais. At length he found his mis- 
take. My poor father ! He grew deeply acquainted with 
arrests, and began to lose his graces and (from failures with 
creditors) his good name. He became irritable with the con- 
sequences, and almost took hope of better days out of the 
heart that loved him, and was too often glad to escape out of 
its society. Yet such an art had he of making his home com- 
fortable when he chose, and of settling himself to the most 
tranquil pleasures, that if she could have ceased to look for- 
ward about her children, I believe, with all his defects, those 
evenings would have brought unmingled satisfaction to her, 
when, after brightening the fire and bringing out the coffee, 
my mother knew that her husband was going to read Saurin 
or Barrow to her, with his fine voice and unequivocal enjoy- 
ment. 

We thus struggled on between quiet and disturbance, 
between placid readings and frightful knocks at the door, and 
sickness, and calamity, and hopes, which hardly ever forsook 
us. One of my brothers went to sea, — a great blow to my 
poor mother. The next was articled to an attorney. My 
brother Robert became pupil to an engraver, and my brother 
John was apprenticed to Mr. Reynell, the printer, whose 
kindly manner, and deep iron voice, I well remember and 
respect. I had also a regard for the speaking trumpet, which 
ran all the way up his tall house, and conveyed his rugged 
whispers to his men. And his goodly wife, proud of her 
husband's grandfather, the bishop; never shall I forget how 
much I loved her for her portly smiles and good dinners, and 
how often she used to make me measure heights with her 
fair daughter Caroline, and found me wanting ; which I 
thought not quite so hospitable. 

As my father's misfortunes, both in America and England, 
were owing, in the first instance, to feelings the most worthy 
and disinterested, so they were never unaccompanied with 
manifestations of the same zeal for others in smaller, though 
not always equally justifiable ways, which he had shown in 



16 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

the greater. He hampered himself, for instance, by becoming 
security for other people. This, however, he could only have 
done out of his usual sanguine belief in the honesty of those 
whom he assisted ; for of collusion with anything deliberately 
unworthy, he was as incapable as he was trusting. His pen, 
though irregular, or unprofitable to himself, was always at the 
service of those who required it for memorials or other helps. 
As to his children, he was healthy and sanguine, and always 
looked forward to being able to do something for them ; and 
something for them he did, if it was only in grafting his 
animal spirits on the maternal stock, and setting them an 
example of independent thinking. But he did more. He 
really took care, considering his rmbusinesslike habits, towards 
settling them in some line of life. It is our faults, not his, 
if we have not been all so successful as we might have been : 
at least it is no more his fault than that of the West Indian 
blood of which we all partake, and which has disposed all 
of us, more or less, to a certain aversion from business. 
And if it may be some vanity in us, at least it is no dis- 
honour to our turn of mind, to hope, that we may have 
been the means of circulating more knowledge and enter- 
tainment in society, than if he had attained the bishopric 
he looked for, and left us ticketed and labelled among the 
acquiescent. 

Towards the latter part of his life, my father's affairs were 
greatly retrieved by the help of his sister, Mrs. Dayrell, who 
came over w r ith a property from Barbados. My aunt was 
generous ; part of her property came among us also by a 
marriage [most probably of the author's eldest brother Stephen 
She well Hunt with Christiana Dayrell]. My father's West 
Indian sun was again warm upon him. On his sister's death, 
to be sure, his struggles recommenced, though not at all in 
comparison to what they had been. Eecommence, however, 
they did ; and yet so sanguine was he in his intentions to the 
last, and so accustomed had my mother been to try to believe 
in him, and to persuade herself she did, that not long before 
she died he made the most solemn promises of amendment, 
which by chance I could not help overhearing, and which she 
received with a tenderness and a tone of joy, the remembrance 
of which brings the tears into my eyes. My father had one 
taste well suited to his profession, and in him, I used to think, 
remarkable. He was very fond of sermons ; which he was 
rarely tired of reading, or my mother of hearing. I have 



THE AUTHOR'S PROGEXITOES. 17 

mentioned the effect which these used to have "upon her. 
When she died, he could not bear to think she was dead ; yet 
retaining, in the midst of his tears, his indestructible tendency 
to seize on a cheering reflection, he turned his very despair 
into consolation ; and in saying, " She is not dead, but sleeps," 
I verily believe the image became almost a literal thing with 
him. Besides his fondness for sermons, he was a great reader 
of the Bible. His copy of it is scored with manuscript; and 
I believe he read a portion of it every morning to the last, 
let him have been as satisfied or dissatisfied with himself as 
he might for the rest of day. This was not hypocrisy; it 
was habit, and real fondness : though, while he was no hypo- 
crite, he was not, I must confess, remarkable for being explicit 
about himself; nor did he cease to dogmatize in a sort of 
official manner upon faith and virtue, lenient as he thought 
himself bound to be to particular instances of frailty. To 
young people, who had no secrets from him, he was especially 
indulgent, as I have good reason to know. He delighted to 
show his sense of a candour in others, which I believe he 
would always have practised himself, had he been taught it 
early. For many years before his death, he had greatly 
relaxed in the orthodoxy of his religious opinions. Both he 
and my mother had become Unitarians. They were also 
Universalists, and great admirers of Mr. Winchester, parti- 
cularly my mother.* My father was willing, however, to 
hear all sides of the question, and used to visit the chapels 
of the most popular preachers of all denominations. His 
favourite among them, I think, was Mr. Worthington, who 
preached at a chapel in Long Acre, and had a strong natural 
eloquence. Politics and divinity occupied almost all the 
conversation that I heard at our fire-side. It is a pity my 
father had been so spoilt a child, and had strayed so much out 
of his sphere ; for he could be contented with little. He was 
one of the last of the gentry who retained the old fashion 
of smoking. He indulged in it every night before he went 
to bed, which he did at an early hour; and it was pleasant 
to see him sit, in his tranquil and gentlemanly manner, and 

* " The Universalists cannot, properly speaking, be called a distinct 
sect, as they are frequently found scattered amongst various denomi- 
nations. They are so named from holding the benevolent opinion, that 
all mankind, nay, even the demons themselves, will be finally restored 
to happiness, through the mercy of Almighty God." — History of all 
Religions and Religious Ceremonies, p. 263. What an impiety towards 
♦' Almighty God," that anybody could ever have thought the reverse ! 

2 



18 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

relate anecdotes of " my Lord North" and the Kockingham 
administration, interspersed with those mild puffs and urbane 
resumptions of the pipe. How often have I thought of him 
under this aspect, and longed for the state of society that 
might have encouraged him to be more successful ! Had he 
lived twenty years longer he would have thought it was 
coming. He died in the year 1809, aged fifty-seven, and 
was buried in the churchyard in Bishopsgate Street. I re- 
member they quarrelled over his coffin for the perquisites 
of the candles ; which put me upon a great many reflections, 
both on him and on the world. 

I bless and am grateful to his memory. One of the last 
sayings of the last surviving of his children but myself, was 
a tribute to it equally simple and sincere. " What a kind 
man," said my brother Eobert, " he was !" 

My grandfather, by my mother's side, was Stephen Shewell, 
merchant of Philadelphia, who sent out his " argosies." His 
mother was a quaker, and he, himself, I believe, descended 
from a quaker stock. He had ships trading to England, 
Holland, and the West Indies, and used to put his sons and 
nephews in them as captains. For sausages and " botargoes" 
(first authors, perhaps, of the jaundice in our blood), Friar 
John would have recommended him. As Chaucer says, 

" It snewed, in his house, of meat and drink." 

On that side of the family we seem all sailors and rough 
subjects, with a mitigation (on the female part) of quakerism; 
as, on the father's side, we are Creoles and claret-drinkers, 
very polite and clerical. 

My grandmother's maiden name was Bickley. I believe 
her family came from Buckinghamshire. The coat of arms 
are three half-moons ; which I happen to recollect, because 
of a tradition we had, that an honourable augmentation was 
made to them of three wheat-sheaves, in reward of some 
gallant achievement performed in cutting off a convoy of pro- 
visions [by Sir William Bickley, a partisan of the House of 
Orange, who was made a Banneret. He was reputed in the 
family to have been the last Englishman who received the 
title of a Knight Banneret, by receiving Knighthood from 
the royal hand, on the field]. My grandmother was an open- 
hearted, cheerful woman, of a good healthy blood. The 
family consisted of five daughters and two sons. One of the 
daughters died unmarried : of the four others, three are dead 



THE AUTHORS PROGENITORS. 19 

also ; the fourth still lives, as upright in her carriage as when 
she was young, and the intelligent mother of two intelligent 
daughters, one of whom, the wife of Dr. Swift, a physician, 
is distinguished for her talent in writing verses. One of my 
uncles died in England, a mild, excellent creature, more fit 
for solitude than the sea. The other, my uncle Stephen, 
a fine handsome fellow of great good nature and gallantry, 
was never heard of, after leaving the port of Philadelphia 
for the "West Indies. He had a practice of crowding too 
much sail, which is supposed to have been his destruction. 
They said he did it " to get back to his ladies." 

My uncle was the means of saving his namesake, my 
brother Stephen, from a singular destiny. Some Indians, 
who came into the city to traffic, had been observed to notice 
my brother a good deal. It is supposed they saw in his tall 
little person, dark face, and long black hair, a resemblance 
to themselves. One day they enticed him from my grand- 
father's house in Front Street, and taking him to the Dela- 
ware, which was close by, were carrying him off across the 
river, when his uncle descried them and gave the alarm. His 
threats induced them to come back ; otherwise, it is thought, 
they intended to carry him into their own quarters, and bring 
him up as an Indian; so that, instead of a rare character of 
another sort, — an attorney who would rather compound a 
quarrel for his clients than get rich by it, — we might have 
had for a brother the Great Buffalo, Bloody Bear, or some 
such grim personage. I will indulge myself with the liberty 
of observing in this place, that with great diversity of 
character among us, with strong points of dispute even among 
ourselves, and with the usual amount, though not perhaps 
exactly the like nature, of infirmities common to other 
people, — some of us, may be, with greater, — we have all 
been persons who inherited the power of making sacrifices for 
the sake of a principle. 

My grandfather, though intimate with Dr. Franklin, was 
secretly on the British side of the question when the Ameri- 
can war broke out. He professed to be neutral, and to 
attend only to business ; but his neutrality did not avail him. 
One of his most valuably laden ships was burnt in the 
Delaware by the Eevolutionists, to prevent its getting into 
the hands of the British ; and besides making free with his 
botargoes, they despatched every now and then a file of 
soldiers to rifle his house of everything else that could be 

2—2 



20 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

serviceable : linen, blankets, &c. And this, unfortunately, 
was only a taste of what he was to suffer ; for, emptying his 
mercantile stores from time to time, they paid him with their 
continental currency, paper-money ; the depreciation of which 
was so great as to leave him, at the close of the war, bankrupt 
of everything but some houses, which his wife brought him. 
They amounted to a sufficiency for the family support ; and 
thus, after all his neutralities, he owed all that he retained 
to a generous and unspeculating woman. His saving grace, 
however, was not on all occasions confined to his money. He 
gave a strong instance of his partiality to the British cause, 
by secreting in his house a gentleman of the name of Slater, 
who commanded a small armed vessel on the Delaware, and 
who was not long since residing in London. Mr. Slater had 
been taken prisoner, and confined at some miles' distance 
from Philadelphia. He contrived to make his escape, and 
astonished my grandfather's family by appearing before them 
at night, drenched in the rain, which descends in torrents 
in that climate. They secreted him for several months in a 
room at the top of the house. 

My mother at that time was a brunette with fine eyes, a 
tall lady-like person, and hair blacker than is seen of English 
growth. It was supposed that Anglo-Americans already 
began to exhibit the influence of climate in their appearance. 
The late Mr. West told me, that if he had met myself or 
any of my brothers in the streets, he should have pronounced, 
without knowing us, that we were Americans. My mother 
had no accomplishments but the two best of all, a love of 
nature and of books. Dr. Franklin offered to teach her the 
guitar; but she w T as too bashful to become his pupil. She 
regretted this afterwards, partly, no doubt, for having lost so 
illustrious a master. Her first child, who died, was named 
after him. I know not whether the anecdote is new; but I 
have heard, that when Dr. Franklin invented the Harmonica, 
he concealed it from his wife till the instrument was fit to play ; 
and then woke her with it one night, when she took it for 
the music of angels. Among the visitors at my grandfather's 
house, besides Franklin, was Thomas Paine ; whom I have 
heard my mother speak of, as having a countenance that 
inspired her with terror. I believe his aspect was not capti- 
vating ; but most likely his political and religious opinions 
did it no good in the eyes of the fair loyalist. 

My mother was diffident of her personal merit, but she 



THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 21 

had great energy of principle. "When the troubles broke out, 
and my father took that violent part in favour of the king, 
a letter was received by her from a person high in authority, 
stating, that if her husband would desist from opposition to 
the general wishes of the colonists, he should remain in 
security; but that if he thought fit to do otherwise, he must 
suffer the consequences which awaited him. The letter con- 
cluded with advising her, as she valued her husband's and 
family's happiness, to use her influence with him to act 
accordingly. To this, " in the spirit of old Rome and 
Greece," as one of her sons has proudly and justly observed 
(I will add, of Old England, and, though contrary to our 
royalist opinions, of New America, too,) my mother replied, 
that she knew her husband's mind too well to suppose for 
a moment that he would so degrade himself; and that the 
writer of the letter entirely mistook her, if he thought her 
capable of endeavouring to persuade him to an action con- 
trary to the convictions of his heart, whatever the conse- 
quences threatened might be. Yet the heart of this excellent 
woman, strong as it was, was already beating with anxiety 
for what might occur ; and on the day when my father was 
seized, she fell into a fit of the jaundice, so violent, as to 
affect her ever afterwards, and subject a previously fine con- 
stitution to every ill that came across it. 

It was nearly two years before my mother could set off 
with her children for England. She embarked in the Earl of 
Effingham frigate, Captain Dempster, who, from the moment 
she was drawn up the sides of the vessel with her little boys, 
conceived a pity and respect for her, and paid her the most 
cordial attention. In truth, he felt more pity for her than 
he chose to express ; for the vessel was old and battered, and 
he thought the voyage not without danger. Nor was it. 
They did very well till they came off the Scilly Islands, when 
a storm arose which threatened to sink them. The ship was 
with difficulty kept above water. Here my mother again 
showed how courageous her heart could be, by the very 
strength of its tenderness. There was a lady in the vessel 
who had betrayed weaknesses of various sorts during the 
voyage ; and who even went so far as to resent the superior 
opinion which the gallant captain could not help entertaining 
of her fellow-passenger., My mother, instead of giving way 
to tears and lamentations, did all she could to keep up the 
spirits of her children. The lady in question did the reverse; 



22 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUKT. 

and my mother feeling the necessity of the case, and touched 
with pity for children in the same danger as her own, was 
at length moved to break through the delicacy she had 
observed, and expostulate strongly with her, to the increased 
admiration of the captain, who congratulated himself on 
having a female passenger so truly worthy of the name of 
woman. Many years afterwards, near the same spot, and 
during a similar danger, her son, the writer of this book, 
with a wife and seven children around him, had occasion to 
call her to mind ; and the example was of service even to 
him, a man. It was thought a miracle that the Earl of 
Effingham was saved. It was driven into Swansea Bay, and 
borne along by the heaving might of the waves into a shallow, 
where no vessel of so large a size ever appeared before ; nor 
could it ever have got there, but by so unwonted an over- 
lifting. 

Having been born nine years later than the youngest of 
my brothers, I have no recollection of my mother's earlier 
aspect. Her eyes were always fine, and her person lady-like ; 
her hair also retained its colour for a long period; but her 
brown complexion had been exchanged for a jaundiced one, 
which she retained through life ; and her cheeks were sunken, 
and her mouth drawn down with sorrow at the corners. 
She retained the energy of her character on great occasions ; 
but her spirit in ordinary was weakened, and she looked at 
the bustle and discord of the present state of society with a 
frightened aversion. My father's danger, and the war- 
whoops of the Indians which she heard in Philadelphia, had 
shaken her soul as well as frame. The sight of two men 
fighting in the streets would drive her in tears down another 
road ; and I remember, when we lived near the park, she 
would take me a long circuit out of the way rather than 
hazard the spectacle of the soldiers. Little did she think of 
the timidity with which she was thus inoculating me, and 
what difficulty I should have, when I went to school, to 
sustain all those fine theories, and that unbending resistance 
to oppression, which she inculcated. However, perhaps it 
ultimately turned out for the best. One must feel more than 
usual for the sore places of humanity, even to fight properly 
in their behalf. Never shall I forget her face, as it used 
to appear to me coming up the cloisters, with that weary hang 
of the head on one side, and that melancholy smile ! 

One holiday, in a severe winter, as she was taking ine 



THE AUTHOR'S progenitors. 23 

home, she was petitioned for charity by a woman sick and 
ill-clothed. It was in Blackfriars' Road, I think about mid- 
way. My mother, with the tears in her eyes, turned up a 
gateway, or some such place, and beckoning the woman to 
follow, took off her flannel petticoat, and gave it her. It is 
supposed that a cold which ensued, fixed the rheumatism 
upon her for life. Actions like these have doubtless been 
often performed, and do not of necessity imply any great 
virtue in the performer; but they do if they are of a piece 
with the rest of the character. Saints have been made for 
charities no greater. 

The reader will allow me to quote a passage out of a poem 
of mine, because it was suggested by a recollection I had upon 
me of this excellent woman. It is almost the only passage in 
that poem worth repeating, which I mention, in order that he 
may lay the quotation to its right account, and not suppose I 
am anxious to repeat my verses because I fancy they must be 
good. In everything but the word " happy," the picture is 
from life. The bird spoken of is the nightingale — the 

" Bird of wakeful glow, 
Whose louder song is like the voice of life, 
Triumphant o'er death's image; but whose deep, 
Low, lovelier note is like a gentle wife, 
A poor, a pensive, yet a happy one, 
Stealing, when daylight's common tasks are done, 
An hour for mother's work; and singing low, 
While her tired husband and her children sleep." 

I have spoken of my mother during my father's troubles in 
England. She stood by him through them all ; and in every- 
thing did more honour to marriage, than marriage did good 
to either of them ; for it brought little happiness to her, and 
too many children to both. Of his changes of opinion, as 
well as of fortune, she partook also. She became a Unitarian, 
a Universalist, perhaps a Eepublican ; and in her new opi- 
nions, as in her old, was apt, I suspect, to be a little too 
peremptory, and to wonder at those who could be of the other 
side. It was her only fault. She would have mended it had 
she lived till now. Though not a republican myself, I have 
been thought, in my time, to speak too severely of kings and 
princes. I think I did, and that society is no longer to be 
bettered in that manner, but in a much calmer and nobler 
way. But I was a witness, in my childhood, to a great deal 
of suffering ; I heard of more all over the world ; and kings 



24 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

and princes bore a great share in the causes to which they 
were traced. 

Some of those causes were not to be denied. It is now 
understood, on all hands, that the continuation of the Ame- 
rican war was owing to the personal stubbornness of the king. 
My mother, in her indignation at him for being the cause of 
so much unnecessary bloodshed, thought that the unfortunate 
malady into which he fell was a judgment of Providence. 

My mother's intolerance, after all, was only in theory. 
When anything was to be done, charity in her always ran 
before faith. If she could have served and benefited the king 
himself personally, indignation would soon have given way to 
humanity. She had a high opinion of everything that was 
decorous and feminine on the part of a wife ; yet when a poor 
violent woman, the wife of an amiable and eloquent preacher, 
w r ent so far on one occasion as to bite his hand in a tit of 
jealous rage as he was going to ascend his pulpit (and he 
preached in great pain), my mother was the only female of her 
acquaintance that continued to visit her ; alleging that she 
needed society and comfort so much the more. She had the 
highest notions of chastity ; yet when a servant came to her, 
who could get no place because she had had an illegitimate 
child, my mother took her into her family upon the strength 
of her candour and her destitute condition, and was served 
during the remainder of the mistress's life with affectionate 
gratitude. 

My mother's favourite books were Dr. Young's Night 
Thoughts (which was a pity), and Mrs. Eowe's Devout Exer- 
cises of the Heart. I remember also her expressing great 
admiration of the novels of Mrs. Inchbald, especially the 
Simple Story. She was very fond of poetry, and used to 
hoard my verses in her pocket-book, and encourage me to 
write, by showing them to the Wests and the Thorntons. 
Her friends loved and honoured her to the last; and, I believe, 
they retained their regard for the family. 

My mother's last illness was long, and was tormented with 
rheumatism. I envied my brother Eobert the recollection of 
the filial attentions he paid her; but they shall be as much 
known as I can make them, not because he was my brother 
(which is nothing), but because he was a good son, which is 
much ; and every good son and mother will be my warrant. 
My other brothers, who were married, were away with their 
families ; and I, who ought to have attended more, was as 



CHILDHOOD. 25 

giddy as I was young, or rather a great deal more so. I 
attended, but not enough. How often have we occasion to 
wish that we could be older or younger than we are, according 
as we desire to have the benefit of gaiety or experience ! Her 
greatest pleasure during her decay was to lie on a sofa, look- 
ing at the setting sun. She used to liken it to the door 
of heaven, and fancy her lost children there, waiting for 
her. She died in the fifty-third year of her age, in a little 
miniature house which stands in a row behind the church 
that has been since built in Somerstown ; and she was 
buried, as she had always wished to be, in the churchyard of 
Hampstead. 



CHAPTER II. 

CHILDHOOD. 



I have spoken of the Duke of Chandos, to whose nephew, 
Mr. Leigh, my father became tutor. Mr. Leigh, who gave 
me his name, was son of the duke's sister, Lady Caroline, and 
died member of parliament. He was one of the kindest and 
gentlest of men, addicted to those tastes for poetry and 
sequestered pleasure, which were conspicuous in his son, Lord 
Leigh; for all which reasons it would seem, and contrary to 
the usurping qualities in such cases made and provided, he 
and his family were subjected to one of the most extraordinary 
charges that a defeated claim ever brought drunken witnesses 
to set up, — no less than the murder and burial of a set oi 
masons, who were employed in building a bridge, and whose 
destruction in the act of so doing was to bury both them and 
a monument which they knew of for ever ! To complete the 
romance of the tragedy, a lady, the wife of the usurper, pre- 
sides over the catastrophe. She cries, " Let go !" while the 
poor wretches are raising a stone at night-time, amidst a scene 
of torches and seclusion ; and down goes the stone, aided by 
this tremendous father and son, and crushes the victims of her 
ambition ! She meant, as Cowley says Goliah did of David, 
" At once their murder and their monument." 
If a charge of the most awful crimes could be dug up 
against the memories of such men as Thomson and Shenstone, 
or of Cowley, or Cowper, or the " Man of Ross," it could 
not have created more laughing astonishment in the minds of 



26 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIQH HUNT. 

those who knew them, than such a charge against the family 
of the Leighs. Its late representative, in the notes to his 
volume of poems, printed some years ago, quoted the " fol- 
lowing beautiful passage " out of Fielding : — 

" It was the middle of May, and the morning was remark- 
ably serene, when Mr. Allworthy walked forth on the terrace, 
where the dawn opened every minute that lovely prospect we 
have before described, to his eye. And now having sent forth 
streams of light which ascended to the firmament before him, 
as harbingers preceding his pomp, in the full blaze of his 
majesty up rose the sun; than which one object alone in this 
lower creation could be more glorious, and that Mr. Allworthy 
himself presented — a human being replete with benevolence, 
meditating in what manner he might render himself most 
acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to his creatures." 

" This," adds the quoter, " is the portrait of a fictitious 
personage ; but I see in it a close resemblance to one whose 
memory I shall never cease to venerate." 

The allusion is to his father, Mr. Leigh. 

But I must not anticipate the verdict of a court of justice.* 
Indeed, I should have begged pardon of my noble friend for 
speaking of this preposterous accusation, did not the very ex- 
cess of it force the words from my pen, and were I not sure 
that my own father would have expected them from me, had 
he been alive to hear it. His lordship must accept them as an 
effusion of grateful sympathy from one father and son to another. 

Lord Leigh has written many a tender and thoughtful 
verse, in which, next to the domestic affections and the pro- 
gress of human kind, he shows that he loves above all things 
the beauties of external nature, and the tranquil pleasures 
they suggest. 

So much do I agree with him, that it is a pleasure to me to 
know that I was even born in so sweet a village as Southgate. 
I first saw the light there on the 19th of October, 1784. It 
found me cradled, not only in the lap of the nature which I love, 
but in the midst of the truly English scenery which I love 
beyond all other. Middlesex in general, like my noble friend's 
county of Warwickshire, is a scene of trees and meadows, of 
" greenery " and nestling cottages ; and Southgate is a prime 
specimen of Middlesex. It is a place lying out of the way of 

* The verdict was subsequently given. It almost seemed ridicu- 
lous, it was 50 unnecessary; except, indeed, as a caution to the like 
of those whom it punished. 



CHILDHOOD. 27 

innovation, therefore it has the pure, sweet air of antiquity 
about it ; and as I am fond of local researches in any quarter, 
it may be pardoned me if in this instance I would fain know 
even the meaning of its name. There is no Northgate, East- 
gate, or Westgate in Middlesex : what, then, is Southgate? 
No topographer tells us ; but an old map of the country 
twenty-five miles round London, drawn up some years pre- 
vious to my childhood, is now before me ; and on looking at 
the boundaries of Enfield Chase, I see that the " Chase-gate," 
the name most likely of the principal entrance, is on the 
north side of it, by North-Hall and Potter's Bar ; while 
Southgate, which has also the name of " South Street," is on 
the Chase's opposite border ; so that it seems evident that 
Southgate meant the southern entrance into the chase, and 
that the name became that of a village from the growth of a 
street. The street, in all probability, was the consequence of 
a fair held in a wood which ran on the western side of it, and 
which, in the map, is designated " Bush Fair." Bush, in old 
English, meant not only a hedge, but a wood ; as Bois or 
Bosco does in French and Italian. Moses and the u burning 
bush " is Moses and the " burning wood ; " which, by the 
way, presents a much grander idea than the modicum of 
hedge commonly assigned to the celestial apparition. There 
is a good deal more wood in the map than is now to be found. 
I wander in imagination through the spots marked in the 
neighbourhood, with their pleasant names — Woodside, Wood 
Green, Palmer Green, Nightingale Hall, &c, and fancy my 
father and mother listening to the nightingales, and loving the 
new little baby, who has now lived to see more years than 
they did. 

Southgate lies in a cross-country road, running from Ed- 
monton through Enfield Chase into Hertfordshire. It is in 
the parish of Edmonton ; so that we may fancy the Merry 
Devil of that place still playing his pranks hereabouts, and 
helping innocent lovers to a wedding, as in the sweet little 
play attributed to Dry den. For as to any such devils going 
to a place less harmonious, it is not to be thought possible by 
good Christians. Furthermore, to slibw what classical ground 
is round about Southgate, and how it is associated with the 
best days of English genius, both old and new, Edmonton is 
the birthplace of Marlowe, the father of our drama, and of 
my friend Home, his congenial celebrator. In Edmonton 
churchyard lies Charles Lamb ; in Highgate churchyard, 



28 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH EUOT. 

Coleridge ; and in Hampstead have resided Shelley and Keats, 
to say nothing of Akenside before them, and of Steele, 
Arbuthnot, and others, before Akenside. 

But the neighbourhood is dear to me on every account ; for 
near Southgate is Colney Hatch, where my mother became 
acquainted with some of her dearest friends, whom I shall 
mention by-and-by. Near Colney Hatch is Finchley, where 
our family resided on quitting Southgate ; and at no great 
distance from Finchley is Mill Hill, where lived excellent Dr. 
W. M. Trinder, Vicar of Hendon, who presented in his person 
the rare combination of clergyman and physician. He boasted 
that he had cured a little child (to wit, myself) of a dropsy in 
the head. The fact was contested, I believe, by the lay part 
of the profession ; but it was believed in the family, and their 
love for the good doctor was boundless. 

I may call myself, in every sense of the word, etymological 
not excepted, a son of mirth and melancholy ; for my father's 
Christian name (as old students of onomancy would have 
heard with serious faces) was Isaac, which is Hebrew for 
" laughter," and my mother's was Mary, which comes from a 
word in the same language signifying " bitterness." And, 
indeed, as I do not remember to have ever seen my mother 
smile, except in sorrowful tenderness, so my father's shouts of 
laughter are now ringing in my ears. Not at any expense to 
her gravity, for he loved her, and thought her an angel on 
earth ; but because his animal spirits were invincible. I 
inherit from my mother a tendency to jaundice, which at 
times has made me melancholy enough. I doubt, indeed, 
whether I have passed a day during half my life, without 
reflections, the first germs of which are traceable to sufferings 
which this tendency once cost me. My prevailing tempera- 
ment, nevertheless, is my father's ; and it has not only enabled 
me to turn those reflections into sources of tranquillity and 
exaltation, but helped my love of my mother's memory to 
take a sort of pride in the infirmity which she bequeathed me. 

I forget whether it was Dr. Trinder — for some purpose of 
care and caution — but somebody told my mother (and she 
believed it), that if I survived to the age of fifteen I might 
turn out to possess a more than average amount of intellect; 
but that otherwise I stood a chance of dying an idiot. The 
reader may imagine the anxiety which this information would 
give to a tender mother. Not a syllable, of course, did she 
breathe to me on the subject till the danger was long past) 



CHILDHOOD. 29 

and doubly did I then become sensible of all the marks of 
affection which I called to mind ; of the unusual things which 
she had done for me ; of the neglect, alas ! which they had 
too often experienced from me, though not to her knowledge ; 
and of the mixture of tenderness and anxiety which I had 
always noted in her face. I was the youngest and least robust 
of her sons, and during early childhood I used hardly to 
recover from one illness before I was seized with another. 
The doctor said I must have gone through an extraordinary 
amount of suffering. I have sometimes been led to consider 
this as the first layer of that accumulated patience with which, 
in after life, I had occasion to fortify myself ; and the suppo- 
sition has given rise to many consolatory reflections on the 
subject of endurance in general. 

To assist my recovery from one of these illnesses, I was 
taken to the coast of France, where, as usual, I fell into 
another ; and one of my earliest recollections is of a good- 
natured French woman, the mistress of the lodging-house at 
Calais, who cried over the " poore littel boy," because I was a 
heretic. She thought I should go to the devil. Poor soul ! 
What torments must the good-hearted woman have under- 
gone ; and what pleasant pastime it is for certain of her loud 
and learned inferiors to preach such doctrines, careless of the 
injuries they inflict, or even hoping to inflict them for the sake 
of some fine deity-degrading lesson, of which their sordid 
imaginations and splenetic itch of dictation assume the neces- 
sity. It was lucky for me that our hostess was a gentle, not 
a violent bigot, and susceptible at her heart of those better 
notions of God which are instinctive in the best natures. She 
might otherwise have treated me, as a late traveller says, 
infants have been treated by Catholic nurses, and murdered 
in order to save me.* 

In returning from the coast of France, we stopped at Deal, 
and I found myself, one evening, standing with an elder brother 
on the beach, looking at a shoal of porpoises, creatures of 
which he had given me some tremendous, mysterious notion. 
I remember, as if it were yesterday, feeling the shades of 
evening, and the solemnity of the spectacle, with an awful 
intensity. There they were, tumbling along in the foam, 
what exactly I knew not, but fearful creatures of some sort. 
My brother spoke to me of them in an under tone of voice, 

* Letters from the Bye-ways of Italy. By Mrs. Henry Stisted. 



30 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

and I held my breath as I looked. The very word " porpoise" 
had an awful, mouthnlling sound. 

This brother of mine, who is now no more, and who might 
have been a Marinell himself, for his notions of wealth and 
grandeur (to say nothing of his marrying, in succession, two 
ladies with dowries, from islands, whom ancient imagination 
could easily have exalted into sea-nymphs), was then a fine 
tall lad, of intrepid spirit, a little too much given to playing 
tricks on those who had less. He was a dozen years older 
than I was, and he had a good deal of the despot in a nature 
otherwise generous. 

To give an instance of the lengths to which my brother 
Stephen carried his claims of ascendancy, he used to astonish 
the boys, at a day-school to w^hich he went at Finchley, by 
appearing among them with clean shoes, when the bad state 
of the lanes rendered the phenomenon unaccountable. Re- 
serve, on the one side, and shame on another, kept the mystery 
a secret for some time. At length it turned out that he was 
in the habit, on muddy days, of making one of his brothers 
carry him to school on his shoulders. 

This brother (Robert), who used to laugh at the recollec- 
tion, and who, as I have intimated, was quite as brave as the 
other, was at a disadvantage on such occasions, from his very 
bravery ; since he knew what a horror my mother would have 
felt had there been any collision between them ; so he used to 
content himself with an oratorical protest, and acquiesce. 
Being a brave, or at all events irritable little fellow enough 
myself, till illness, imagination, and an ultra tender and 
anxious rearing, conspired to render me fearful and patient, I 
had no such consequences to think of. When Stephen took 
me bodily in hand, I was only exasperated. I remember the 
furious struggles I used to make, and my endeavours to get 
at his shins, when he would hold me at arm's length, " aggra- 
vating" me (as the phrase is) by taunting speeches, and 
laughing like a goblin. 

But on the " night-side of human nature," as Mrs. Crowe 
calls it, he " had me." I might confront him and endeavour 
to kick his shins by daylight, but with respect to ghosts, as 
the sailor said, I did not " understand their tackle." I had 
unfortunately let him see that I did not like to be in the dark, 
and that I had a horror of dreadful faces, even in books. I 
had found something particularly ghastly in the figure of an 
old man crawling on the ground, in some frontispiece — I think 






CHILDHOOD. 31 

to a book called the Looking - Glass ; and there was a fabulous 
wild-beast, a portrait of which, in some picture-book, un- 
speakably shocked me. It was called the Mantichora. It 
had the head of a man, grinning with rows of teeth, and the 
body of a wild-beast, brandishing a tail armed with stings. 
It was sometimes called by the ancients .Martichora. But I 
did not know that. I took the word to be a horrible com- 
pound of man and tiger. The beast figures in Pliny and the 
old travellers. Apollonius had heard of him. He takes a 
fearful joy in describing him, even from report : — 

" Apollonius asked ' if they had among them the Marti- 
chora.' 'What!' said Tarchas, 'have you heard of that 
animal ; for if you have, you have probably heard something 
extraordinary of its figure.' ' Great and wonderful things 
have I heard of it,' replied Apollonius. ' It is of the number 
of quadrupeds, has a head like a man's, is as large as a lion, 
with a tail from which bristles grow, of the length of a cubit, 
all as sharp as prickles, which it shoots forth like so many 
arrows against its pursuers.' " * 

That sentence, beginning " Great and wonderful things," 
proves to me, that Apollonius must once have been a little 
boy, looking at the picture-books. The possibility of such 
" creatures" being " pursued" never occurred to me. Alex- 
ander, I thought, might have been encountered while crossing 
the Granicus, and elephants might be driven into the sea; 
but how could any one face a beast with a man's head ? One 
look of its horrid countenance (which it always carried front- 
ing you, as it went by — I never imagined it seen in profile) 
w T ould have been enough, I concluded, to scare an army. 
Even full-grown dictionary makers have been frightened out 
of their propriety at the thought of him. " Mantichora," 
says old Morell — " bestia horrenda " — (a brute fit to give one 
the horrors). 

In vain my brother played me repeated tricks with this 
frightful anomaly. I was always ready to be frightened again. 
At one time he would grin like the Mantichora; then he 
would roar like him ; then call about him in the dark. I 
remember his asking me to come up to him one night at the 
top of the house. I ascended, and found the door shut. 
Suddenly a voice came through the key-hole, saying, in its 
hollowesfc tones, " The Mantichora' s coming." Down I rushed 
to the parlour, fancying the terror at my heels. 
* Berwick's Translation, p. 176, 



32 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

I dwell the more on this seemingly petty circumstance, 
because such things are no petty ones to a sensitive child. 
My brother had no idea of the mischief they did me. Per- 
haps the mention of them will save mischief to others. They 
helped to morbidize all that was weak in my temperament, 
and cost me many a bitter night.* 

Another time I was reading to him, while he was recovering 
in bed from an accident. He was reckless in his play; had 
once broken his leg on Hampstead Heath ; and was now 
getting well from a broken collar-bone. He gave me a volume 
to read to him, either of Elegant Extracts or Aikin's Miscel- 
lanies (I think the former), and selected the story of " Sir 
Bertrand." He did not betray by his face what was coming. 
I was enchanted with the commencement about the " dreary 
moors " and the " curfew ; " and I was reading on with breath- 
less interest, when, at one of the most striking passages, — 
probably some analogous one about a noise, — he contrived, 
with some instrument or other, to give a tremendous knock 

* Since this passage was written, I have met with one in Tod's 
Travels in Western India, p. 82, &c., in which the veritable origin of 
the idea of the Mantichora is, I have no doubt, set forth. India has ever 
been a land of extremes, both spiritual and bodily. At the moment 
when I write (September, 1857) it is a land of horrors. Here is one, 
existing five-and-thirty years ago, and in all probability existing still, 
which shows the outrageous tendency to excess on the side of mad 
superstition, and of brute contradiction to humanity, characteristic 
of the lower forms of Indian degradation. It is the sect of the Aghori, 
who, among other unspeakable viands, fed on dead bodies, and were 
first re- mentioned, after the ancient writers, by the celebrated tra- 
veller Thevenot, who says they were called Merdi-coura, or eaters of 
men. Colonel Tod observes, " It is a curious fact, as D'Anville adds, 
that * this espece de bete,' this Merdi-cour, or, properly, Merdi-khor, 
should have been noticed by Pliny, Aristotle, and Ctesias, under 
nearly the same name — Marti-chora, giving its synonym in their 
own language, ' 'Av6po7ro(j)ayog ; for Merdi-khor is a Persian compound, 
from merd, ' man/ and khoordun ' to eat.' " 

" I passed," says the Colonel, " the gopha, or cave, of the most 
celebrated of the monsters of the present age, who was long the 
object of terror and loathing to Aboo and its neighbourhood. His 
name was Futteh Poori ; who, after having embowelled whatever 
came in his way, took the extraordinary resolution of immuring 
himself in his cell. The commands of maniacs generally meet with 
ready obedience; and as he was regarded by many in this light, his 
desire was implicitly fulfilled. The mouth of the cave was built up ; 
and will remain so, till some mummy-hunting Frank shall re-open 
it, or till phrenology form a part of the modern education of a Hindu; 
when, doubtless, the organ of destruction on the cranium of Futteh 
Poori will exhibit a high state of development." 



CHILDHOOD. 83 

on the wall. Up I jumped, aghast ; and the invalid lay 
rolling with laughter. 

So healthily had I the good fortune to be brought up in 
point of religion, that (to anticipate a remark which might have 
come in at a less effective place) I remember kneeling one day 
at the school-church during the Litany, when the thought fell 
upon me — " Suppose eternal punishment should, be true." An 
unusual sense of darkness and anxiety crossed me — but only 
for a moment. The next instant the extreme absurdity and 
impiety of the notion restored me to my ordinary feelings ; 
and from that moment to this, — respect the mystery of the 
past as I do, and attribute to it what final good out of fugi- 
tive evil I may, — I have never for one instant doubted the 
transitoriuess of the doctrine and the unexclusive goodness of 
futurity. All those question-begging argumentations of the 
churches and schools, which are employed to reconcile the 
inflictions of the nursery to the gift of reason, and which 
would do quite as well for the absurdities of any one creed as 
another (indeed, they would be found to have done so, were 
we as deeply read in the religions of the East as of the West), 
come to nothing before the very modesty to which they appeal, 
provided it is a modesty healthy and loving. The more even 
of fugitive evil which it sees (and no ascertained evil suffered 
by any individual creature is otherwise), nay, the more which 
is disclosed to it in the very depths and concealments of 
nature, only the more convinces it that the great mystery of 
all things will allow of no lasting evil, visible or invisible ; 
and therefore it concludes that the evil which does exist is for 
some good purpose, and for the final blessing of all sentient 
beings, of whom it takes a care so remarkable. 

I know not whether it was fortunate or unfortunate for 
me, humanly speaking, that my mother did not see as far into 
healthiness of training in other respects as in this. Some of 
the bad consequences to myself were indeed obvious, as the 
reader has seen ; but it may have enabled me to save worse 
to others. If I could find any fault with her memory (speaking 
after an ordinary fashion), it would be that I was too deli- 
cately bred, except as to what is called good living. My 
parents were too poor for luxury. But she set me an example 
of such excessive care and anxiety for those about us, that I 
remember I could not see her bite off the ends of her thread 
while at work without being in pain till I was sure she would 
rbt swallow them. She used to be so agitated at the sight of 



84 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

discord and quarrelling, particularly when it came to blows, 
and between the rudest or gayest combatants in the street, 
that, although it did not deprive her of courage and activity 
enough to interfere (which she would do if there was the 
slightest chance of effect, and which produced in myself a 
corresponding discrimination between sensibility and endea- 
vour), it gave me an ultra-sympathy with the least show of 
pain and suffering ; and she had produced in me such a horror, 
or rather such an intense idea of even violent words, and of the 
commonest trivial oath, that being led one day, perhaps by the 
very excess of it, to snatch a " fearful joy" in its utterance, 
it gave me so much remorse that for some time afterwards I 
could not receive a bit of praise, or a pat of encouragement on 
the head, without thinking to myself, "Ah! they little suspect 
that I am the boy who said, ' d — n it.' " 

Dear mother ! No one could surpass her in generosity ; 
none be more willing to share, or to take the greatest portion 
of blame to themselves, of any evil consequences of mistake 
to a son ; but if I have not swallowed very many camels in the 
course of my life, it has not been owing, perhaps, to this too 
great a straining at gnats. How happy shall I be (if I may) 
to laugh and compare notes with her on the subject in any 
humble corner of .heaven; to recall to her the filial tenderness 
with which she was accustomed to speak of the mistakes of 
one of her own parents, and to think that her grandchildren 
will be as kind to the memory of their father. 

I may here mention, as a ludicrous counterpart to this 
story, and a sample of the fantastical nature of scandal, that 
somebody having volunteered a defence of my character on 
some occasion to Mr. Wordsworth, as though the character 
had been questioned by him — the latter said he had never 
heard anything against it, except that I was M given to 
swearing." 

I certainly think little of the habit of swearing, however 
idle, if it be carried no further than is done by many gallant 
and very good men, wise and great ones not excepted. I 
wish I had no worse faults to answer for. But the fact is, 
that however I may laugh at the puerile conscience of the 
anecdote just mentioned, an oath has not escaped my lips 
from that day to this. 

I hope no " good fellow " will think ill of me for it. If he 
did, I should certainly be tempted to begin swearing imme- 
diately, purely to vindicate my character. But there was no 



CHILDHOOD. 35 

swearing in our family ; there was none in our school (Christ 
Hospital); and I seldom ever fell in the way of it anywhere 
except in books; so that the practice was not put into my 
head. I look upon Tom Jones, who swore, as an angel of 
light compared with Blifil, who, I am afraid, swore no more 
than myself. Steele, I suspect, occasionally rapped out an 
oath; which is not to be supposed of Addison. And this, 
again, might tempt me into a. grudge against my nonjuring 
turn of colloquy; for I must own that I prefer open-hearted 
Steele with all his faults, to Addison with all his essays. But 
habit is habit, negative as well as positive. Let him that is 
without one, cast the first sarcasm. 

After all, swearing was once seriously* objected to me, and 
I had given cause for it. I must own, that I even begged 
hard to be allow r ed a few oaths, It was for an article in 
a magazine (the New Monthly), where I had to describe a 
fictitious person, whose character I thought required it ; and 
I pleaded truth to nature, and the practice of the good old 
novelists ; but in vain. The editor was not to be entreated. 
He was Mr. Theodore Hook. Perhaps this was what gave 
rise to the poet's impression. 

But to return to my reminiscences. It may appear sur- 
prising to some, that a child brought up in such scruples of 
conscience, and particularly in such objections to pugnacity, 
should have ever found himself in possession of such toys as a 
drum and a sword. A distinguished economist, who was 
pleased the other day to call me the "spoiled child of the 
public" (a title which I should be proud to possess), ex- 
pressed his astonishment that a person so " gentle " should 
have been a fighter in the thick of politics. But the "gentle- 
ness" was the reason. I mean, that under certain circum- 
stances of training, the very love of peace and comfort, in 
begetting a desire to see those benefits partaken by others, 
begets a corresponding indignation at seeing them withheld. 

I am aware of the perils of reaction to which this feeling 
tends ; of the indulgence in bad passions which it may dis- 
guise ; of the desirableness of quietly advocating whatever is 
quietly to be secured; of the perplexity occasioned to all 
these considerations by the example which appears to be set 
by nature herself in her employment of storm and tempest ; 
and of the answer to be given to that perplexity by the 
modesty of human ignorance and its want of certainty of 
ight. Neverthelessj till this question be settled (and the 

3—2 



36 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

sooner the justice of the world can settle it the better), it 
renders the best natures liable to inconsistencies between 
theory and practice, and forces them into self-reconcilements 
of conscience, neither quite so easy in the result, nor so 
deducible from perfect reason as they would suppose. My 
mother, whose fortunes had been blighted, and feelings ago- 
nized, by the revolution in America, and who had conceived 
such a horror of war, that when we resided once near the 
Park, she would take a long circuit (as I have before men- 
tioned), rather than go through it, in order to avoid seeing 
the soldiers, permitted me, nevertheless, to have the drum 
and the sword. Why? Because, if the sad necessity were 
to come, it would be her son's duty to war against war itself — 
to fight against those who oppressed the anti-fighters. 

My father, entertaining these latter opinions without any 
misgiving (enforced, too, as they were by his classical educa- 
tion), and both my parents being great lovers of sermons, 
which he was in the habit of reading to us of an evening, 
I found myself at one time cultivating a perplexed ultra-con- 
scientiousness with my mother ; at another, laughing and 
being jovial with my father; and at a third, hearing from 
both of them stories of the Greek and Eoman heroes, some of 
whom she admired as much as he did. The consequence was, 
that I one day presented to the astonished eyes of the maid- 
servant a combination that would have startled Dr. Trinder, 
and delighted the eyes of an old Puritan. To clap a sword 
by my side, and get the servant to pin up my hat into the 
likeness of the hat military, were symptoms of an ambition 
which she understood and applauded; but when I proceeded 
to append to this martial attire one of my father's bands, and, 
combining the military with the ecclesiastical authority, got 
upon a chair to preach to an imaginary audience over the 
back of it, she seemed to think the image realized of " heaven 
and earth coming together." However, she ended with enjoy- 
ing, and even abetting, this new avatar of the church militant. 
Ead I been a Mohammed, she would have been my first 
proselyte, and I should have called her the Maid-servant of 
the Faithful. She was a good, simple-hearted creature, who 
from not having been fortunate with the first orator in whom 
she believed, had stood a chance of ruin for life, till received 
into the only family that would admit her; and she lived and 
died in its service. 

The desire thus childishly exhibited, of impressing some 



CHILDHOOD. 37 

religious doctrine, never afterwards quitted me; though, in 
consequence of the temperament which I inherited from one 
parent, and the opinions which I derived from both, it took a 
direction singularly cheerful. For a man is but his parents, - 
or some other of his ancestors, drawn out. My father, though 
a clergyman of the Established Church, had settled, as well as 
my mother, into a Christian of the Universalist persuasion, 
which believes in the final restoration of all things. It was 
hence that I learned the impiety (as I have expressed it) of 
the doctrine of eternal punishment. In the present day, a 
sense of that impiety, in some way or other, whether of doubt 
or sophistication, is the secret feeling of nine-tenths of all 
churches; and every church will discover, before long, that 
it must rid itself of the doctrine, if it would not cease to exist. 
Love is the only creed destined to survive all others. They 
who think that no church can exist without a strong spice of 
terror, should watch the growth of education, and see which 
system of it is the most beloved. They should see also which 
system in the very nursery is growing the most ridiculous. 
The threat of the "black man and the coal-hole" has vanished 
from all decent infant training. What answer is the father, 
who would uphold the worst form of it, to give to the child 
whom he has spared the best ? 

How pleasant it is, in reviewing one's life, to look back on 
the circumstances that originated or encouraged any kindly 
tendency ! I behold, at this moment, with lively distinct- 
ness, the handsome face of Miss C, who was the first person 
I remember seeing at a pianoforte ; and I have something of a 
like impression of that of Miss M., mother, if I mistake not, 
or, at all events, near relation, of my distinguished friend 
Sheridan Knowles. My parents and his were acquainted. 
My mother, though fond of music, and a gentle singer in her 
way, had missed the advantage of a musical education, partly 
from her coming of a half-quaker stock, partly (as I have 
said before) from her having been too diffident to avail her- 
self of the kindness of Dr. Franklin, who offered to teach her 
the guitar. 

The reigning English composer at that time was " Mr. 
Hook," as he was styled at the head of his songs. He was 
the father of my punctilious editor of the magazine, and had 
a real, though small vein of genius, which was none the 
better for its being called upon to flow profusely for Kanelagh 
and Vauxhall. He was composer of the " Lass of Richmond 



88 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Hill" (an allusion to a penchant of George IV.), and of another 
popular song more lately remembered, " 'Twas within a mile 
of Edinborough town." The songs of that day abounded in 
Strephons and Delias, and the music partook of the gentle 
inspiration. The association of early ideas with that kind of 
commonplace, has given me more than a toleration for it. 
I find something even touching in the endeavours of an inno- 
cent set of ladies and gentlemen, my fathers and mothers, to 
identify themselves with shepherds and shepherdesses, even 
in the most impossible hats and crooks. I think of the many 
heartfelt smiles that must have welcomed love letters and 
verses containing that sophisticate imagery, and of the no less 
genuine tears that were shed over the documents when faded ; 
and criticism is swallowed up in those human drops. This is 
one of the reasons why I can read even the most faded part 
of the works of Shenstone, and why I can dip again and 
again into such correspondence as that of the Countesses 
of Hertford and Pomfret, and of my Lady Luxborough, who 
raises monuments in her garden to the united merits of 
Mr. Somerville and the god Pan. The feeling was true, 
though the expression was sophisticate and a fashion ; and 
they who cannot see the feeling for the mode, do the very 
thing which they think they scorn; that is, sacrifice the 
greater consideration for the less. 

But Hook was not the only, far less the most fashionable 
composer. There were (if not all personally, yet popularly 
contemporaneous) Mr. Lampe, Mr. Oswald, Dr. Boyce, Lin- 
ley, Jackson, Shield, and Storace, with Paesiello, Sacchini, 
and others at the King's Theatre, whose delightful airs wan- 
dered into the streets out of the English operas that bor- 
rowed them, and became confounded with English property. 
I have often, in the course of my life, heard " Whither, 
my love?" and "For tenderness formed," boasted of, as 
specimens of English melody. For many years I took them 
for such myself, in common with the rest of our family, with 
whom they were great favourites. The first, which Stephen 
Storace adapted to some words in the Haunted Tower, is the 
air of " La Kachelina" in Paesiello's opera La Molinara. The 
second, which was put by General Burgoyne to a song in his 
comedy of the Heiress, is " lo sono Lindoro," in the same 
enchanting composer's Barbiere di Siviglia. The once popu- 
lar English songs and duets, &c, "Plow imperfect is expres- 
sion;" "For me, my fair a wreath -has wove;" "Henry 






CHILDHOOD. 39 

cull'd the now'ret's bloom;" "Oh, tliou wert born to please 
me;" "Here's a health to all good lasses;" " Youth's the 
season made for joys;" " Gently touch the warbling lyre;" 
" No, 'twas neither shape nor feature;" " Pray, Goody, please 
to moderate;" " Hope told a nattering tale;" and a hundred 
others, were all foreign compositions, chiefly Italian. Every 
burlesque or buffo song, of any pretension, was pretty sure to 
be Italian. 

When Edwin, Fawcett, and others, were rattling away 
in the happy comic songs of O'Keeffe, with his triple rhymes 
and illustrative jargon, the audience little suspected that they 
were listening to some of the finest animal spirits of the south 
— to Piccini, Paesiello, and Cimarosa. Even the wild Irish- 
man thought himself bound to go to Naples, before he could 
get a proper dance for his gaiety. The only genuine 
English compositions worth anything at that time, were 
almost confined to Shield, Dibdin, and Storace, the last of 
whom, the author of " Lullaby," who was an Italian born 
in England, formed the golden link between the music of 
the two countries, the only one, perhaps, in which English 
accentuation and Italian flow were ever truly amalgamated ; 
though I must own that I am heretic enough (if present 
fashion is orthodoxy) to believe, that Arne was a real musical 
genius, of a very pure, albeit not of the very first water. He 
has set, indeed, two songs of Shakspeare's (the " Cuckoo 
song," and " Where the bee sucks,") in a spirit of perfect 
analogy to the words, as well as of the liveliest musical inven- 
tion; and his air of "Water parted," in Arlaxerxes, winds 
about the feelings with an earnest and graceful tenderness of 
regret, worthy in the highest degree of the affecting beauty 
of the sentiment.* 

All the favourite poetry of the day, however, was of one 
cast. I have now before me a Select Collection of English 
Songs, by Ritson, published in the year 1783, in three 
volumes octavo, the last of which contains the musical airs. 
The style is of the following description : — 

Almeria's face, her shape, her air, 

With charms resistless wound the heart, &c. p. 2. 

* " Dr. Ha}'dn was delighted with Artaxerxes ; and he told my dear 
mother (for he was frequently with us at Vauxhall) that he had not 
an idea we had such an opera in the English language." — Letter of 
Mrs. Henslow in Cradock's Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs. 
Vol. iv. p. 133. 



40 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

(I should not wonder if dear Almeria Thornton, whose tender 
affection for my mother will appear in another chapter, was 
christened out of this song.) 

Say, Myra, why is gentle love, &c. 
Which racks the amorous breast, 

by Lord Lyttelton, the most admired poet, perhaps, of the age. 

When Delia on the plain appears ; 
also bj his lordship. 

In vain, Philander, at my feet. 

Ah, Damon, dear shepherd, adieu. 

Come, thou rosy dimpled boy, 
Source of every heartfelt joy, 
Leave the blissful bowers a while, 
Paphos and the Cyprian isle. 

This was a favourite song in our house. So was " Come, 
now, all ye social powers," and 

Come, let us dance and sing, 
While all Barbados bells shall ring ; 

probably on account of its mention of my father's native 
place. The latter song is not in Ritson. It was the finale 
in Cohnan's Inkle and Yarico, a play founded on a Barbadian 
story, which our family must have gone with delight to see. 
Another favourite, which used to make my mother shed tears, 
on account of my sister Eliza, who died early, was Jackson of 
Exeter's song — 

Encompass'd in an angel's frame. 

It is, indeed, a touching specimen of that master. The 
" Hardy Tar," also, and " The topsails shiver in the wind," 
used to charm yet sadden her, on account of my eldest bro- 
ther then living, who was at sea. The latter, written by the 
good-natured and gallant Captain Thompson, was set to 
music, I think, by Arne's son, Michael, who had a fine 
musical sea-vein, simple and strong. He was the composer 
of " Fresh and strong the breeze is blowing." 

The other day I found two songs of that period on Robin- 
son's music-stall in Wardour Street, one by Mr. Hook, entitled 
" Alone, by the light of the moon ; " the other, a song with a 
French burden, called "Dans votre lit;" an innocent pro- 
duction, notwithstanding its title. They were the only songs 
I recollect singing when a child, and I looked on them with 
the accumulated tenderness of sixty-three years of age. I do 
not remember to have set eyes on them in the interval. What 



CHILDHOOD. 41 

a difference between the little smooth-faced boy at his 
mothers knee, encouraged to lift up his voice to the piano- 
forte, and the battered grey-headed senior, looking again, for 
the first time, on what he had sung at the distance of more 
than half a century ! Life often seems a dream ; but there 
are occasions when the sudden re-appearance of early objects, 
by the intensity of their presence, not only renders the in- 
terval less present to the consciousness than a very dream, 
but makes the portion of life which preceded it seem to have 
been the most real of all things, and our only undreaming 
time. 

" Alone, by the light of the moon," and " Dans votre lit !" 
how had they not been thumbed and thrown aside by all the 
pianoforte young ladies — our mothers and grandmothers — 
fifty years ago, never to be brought forth again, except by an 
explorer of old stalls, and to meet, perhaps, with no sym- 
pathy but in his single imagination ! Yet there I stood ; and 
Wardour Street, every street, all London, as it now exists, 
became to me as if it had never been. The universe itself 
was nothing but a poor sitting-room in the year '89 or '90, 
with my mother in it bidding me sing, Miss C. at the piano- 
forte — harpsichord more likely, and my little sister, Mary, 
with her round cheeks and blue eyes, wishing me to begin. 
What a great singer is that little boy to those loving relations, 
and how Miss C, with all her good nature, must be smiling 
at the importance of little boys to their mothers ! " Alone, 
by the light of the moon," was the " show song," but " Dans 
votre lit " was the favourite with my sister, because, in her 
ignorance of the French language, she had associated the 
name of her brother with the sound of the last word. 

The song was a somewhat gallant, but very decorous song, 
apostrophizing a lady as a lily in the flower-bed. It was 
"silly, sooth," and "dallied with the innocence of love" in 
those days, after a fashion which might have excited livelier 
ideas in the more restricted imaginations of the present. The 
reader has seen that my mother, notwithstanding her chari- 
tableness to the poor maid-servant, w r as a woman of strict 
morals ; the tone of the family conversation was scrupulously 
correct, though, perhaps, a little flowery and Thomson-like 
(Thomson was the favourite poet of most of us) ; yet the songs 
that were sung at that time by the most fastidious might be 
thought a shade freer than w^ould suit the like kind of society 
at present. Whether w r e are more innocent in having become 



42 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

more ashamed, I shall not judge. Assuredly, the singer of 
those songs was as innocent as the mother that bade him sing 
them. 

My little sister Mary died not long after. She was so 
young, that my only recollection of her, besides her blue eyes, 
is her love of her brother, and her custom of leading me by 
the hand to some stool or seat on the staircase, and making 
me sing the song with her favourite burden. We were the 
two youngest children, and about of an age. 

I please myself with picturing to my imagination what was 
going forward during my childhood in the world of politics, 
literature, and public amusements ; how far they interested 
my parents ; and what amount of impression they may have 
left on my own mind. The American Eevolution, which had 
driven my father from Philadelphia, was not long over, and 
the French Eevolution was approaching. My father, for 
reasons which have already been mentioned, listened more 
and more to the new opinions, and my mother listened, not 
only from love to her husband, but because she was still more 
deeply impressed by speculations regarding the welfare of 
human kind. The public mind, after a long and comparatively 
insipid tranquillity, had begun to be stirred by the eloquence 
of Burke ; by the rivalries of Pitt and Fox ; by the thanks 
which the king gave to heaven for his recovery from his 
first illness; by the warlike and licentious energies of the 
Eussian Empress, Catherine II., who partly shocked and 
partly amused them ; and by the gentler gallantries and 
showy luxury of the handsome young Prince of Wales, after- 
wards George IV. 

In the world of literature and art, Goldsmith and Johnson 
had gone ; Cowper was not yet much known ; the most pro- 
minent poets were Hayley and Darwin ; the most distinguished 
prose -writer, Gibbon. Sir Joshua Eeynolds was in his decline, 
so was Horace Walpole. The Kembles had come up in the 
place of Garrick. There were excellent comic actors in the 
persons of Edwin, Lewis, young Bannister, &c. They had 
O'Keeffe, an original humourist, to write for them. I have 
already noticed the vocal portion of the theatres. Miss Burney, 
afterwards Madame d'Arblay, surprised the reading world 
with her entertaining, but somewhat vulgar novels ; and Mrs. 
Inchbald, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and a then anonymous author, 
Eobert Bage (who wrote Hermsprong, and Man as He Is), 
delighted liberal politicians with theirs. Mrs. Inchbald was 



CHILDHOOD. 43 

also a successful dramatist ; but her novels, which were written 
in a style to endure, were her chief merits. 

My mother was one of their greatest admirers. I have 
heard her expatiate with delight on the characters in Nature 
and Art, which, though not so masterly a novel as the Simple 
Story, and a little wilful in the treatment, was full of matter 
for reflection, especially on conventional, and what are now 
called " class" points. Dr. Philpotts would have accused my 
mother of disaffection to the Church ; and she would not have 
mended the matter by retreating on her admiration of Bishops 
Hoadley and Shipley. Her regard for the reverend author of 
Meditations in a Flower Garden would have made the doctor 
smile, though she would have recovered, perhaps, something 
of his good opinion by her admiration of Dr. Young and his 
Night Thoughts. But Young deluded her with his groans 
against the world, and his lamentations for his daughter. She 
did not know that he was a preferment-hunter, who was pros- 
perous enough to indulge in the " luxury of woe," and to 
groan because his toast was not thrice buttered. 

Ranelagh and Vauxhall, as painted in Miss Burney's novels, 
were among the fashionable amusements of those days. My 
mother was neither rich nor gay enough to see much of them ; 
but she was no ascetic, and she went where others did, as occa- 
sion served. My father, whose manners were at once high- 
bred and lively, had some great acquaintances ; but I recollect 
none of them personally, except an old lady of quality, who 
(if memory does not strangely deceive me, and give me a per- 
sonal share in what I only heard talked of ; for old auto- 
biographers of childhood must own themselves liable to such 
confusions) astounded me one day, by letting her false teeth 
slip out, and clapping them in again. 

I had no idea of the existence of such phenomena, and could 
almost as soon have expected her to take off her head and re- 
adjust it. She lived in Red Lion Square, a quarter in different 
estimation from what it is now. It was at her house, I be- 
lieve, that my father one evening met Wilkes. He did not 
know him by sight, and happening to fall into conversation 
with him, while the latter sat looking down, he said something 
in Wilkes's disparagement; on which the jovial demagogue 
looked up in his face, and burst out a laughing. 

I do not exactly know how people dressed at that time ; 
but I believe that sacks, and negligees, and toupees were go- 
ing out, and the pigtail and the simpler modern style of dress 



44 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

coming in. I recollect hearing my mother describe the misery 
of having her hair dressed two or three stories high, and of 
lying in it all night ready for some visit or spectacle next 
day. I think I also recollect seeing Wilkes himself in an old- 
fashioned flap-waistcoated suit of scarlet and gold ; and I am 
sure I have seen Murphy, the dramatist, a good deal later, in 
a suit of a like fashion, though soberer, and a large cocked- 
hat. The cocked-hat in general survived till nearly the pre- 
sent century. It was superseded by the round one during the 
French Revolution. I remember our steward at school, a 
very solemn personage, making his appearance in one, to our 
astonishment, and not a little to the diminution of his dignity. 
Some years later, I saw Mr. Pitt in a blue coat, buckskin 
breeches and boots, and a round hat, with powder and pigtail. 
He was thin and gaunt, with his hat off his forehead, and his 
nose in the air, — that nose on which Hazlitt said he " sus- 
pended the House of Commons." Much about the same time 
I saw his friend, the first Lord Liverpool, a respectable look- 
ing old gentleman, in a brown wig. Later still, I saw Mr. Fox, 
fat and jovial, though he was then declining. He, who had 
been a " beau" in his youth, then looked something quaker- 
like as to dress, with plain coloured clothes, a broad round 
hat, white waistcoat, and, if I am not mistaken, white stock- 
ings. He was standing in Parliament-street, just where the 
street commences as you leave Whitehall ; and was making 
two young gentlemen laugh heartily at something which he 
seemed to be relating. 

My father once took me — but I cannot say at what period 
of my juvenility — into both houses of Parliament. In the 
Commons, I saw Mr. Pitt sawing the air, and occasionally 
turning to appeal to those about him, wdiile he spoke in a 
loud, important, and hollow voice. When the persons he 
appealed to, said " Hear ! hear !" I thought they said " Dear ! 
dear !" in objection ; and I wondered that he did not seem 
in the least degree disconcerted. The House of Lords, I must 
say (without meaning disrespect to an assembly which must 
always have contained some of the most accomplished men in 
the country), surprised me with the personally insignificant 
look of its members. I had, to be sure, conceived exagger- 
ated notions of the magnates of all countries ; and perhaps 
might have expected to behold a set of conscript fathers ; but 
in no respect, real or ideal, did they appear to me in their cor- 
porate aspect, like anything which is understood by the word 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 45 

"noble." The Commons seemed to me to have the advan- 
tage ; though they surprised me with lounging on the benches 
and retaining their hats. I was not then informed enough to 
know the difference between apparent and substantial import- 
ance; much less aware of the positive exaltation, which that 
very simplicity, and that absence of pretension, gave to the 
most potent assembly in Europe. 



CHAPTER III. 

SCHOOL-DAYS. 



Books for children during the latter part of the eighteenth 
century had been in a bad way, with sordid and merely 
plodding morals — ethics that were necessary perhaps for a 
certain stage in the progress of commerce and for its greatest 
ultimate purposes (undreamt of by itself), but which thwarted 
healthy and large views of society for the time being. They 
were the consequences of an altogether unintellectual state of 
trade, aided and abetted by such helps to morality as 
Hogarth's pictures of the Good and Bad Apprentice, which 
identified virtue with prosperity. 

Hogarth, in most of his pictures, was as healthy a moralist 
as he supposed himself, but not for the reasons which he 
supposed. The gods he worshipped were Truth and Pru- 
dence ; but he saw more of the carnal than spiritual beauties 
of either. He was somewhat of a vulgarian in intention as 
well as mode. But wherever there is genius, there is a 
genial something greater than the accident of breeding, than 
the prevailing disposition, or even than the conscious design ; 
and this portion of divinity within the painter, saw fair-play 
between his conventional and immortal part. It put the 
beauty of colour into his mirth, the counteraction of mirth 
into his melancholy, and a lesson beyond his intention into 
all : that is to say, it suggested redemptions and first causes 
for the objects of his satire ; and thus vindicated the justice 
of nature, at the moment when he was thinking of little but 
the pragmaticalness of art. 

The children's books in those days were Hogarth's pictures 
taken in their most literal acceptation. Every good boy was 
to ride in his coach, and be a lord mayor ; and every bad boy 
was to be hung, or eaten by lions. The gingerbread was 



46 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

gilt, and the books were gilt like the gingerbread, — a u take 
in" the more gross, inasmuch as nothing could be plainer or 
less dazzling than the books of the same boys when they grew 
a little older. There was a lingering old ballad or so in favour 
of the gallanter apprentices who tore out lions 7 hearts and asto- 
nished gazing sultans ; and in antiquarian corners, Percy's 
" Beliques" were preparing a nobler age, both in poetry and 
prose. But the first counteraction came, as it ought, in the 
shape of a new book for children. The pool of mercenary 
and time-serving ethics was first blown over by the fresh 
country breeze of Mr. Day's Sandford and Merton — a pro- 
duction that I well remember, and shall ever be grateful to. 
It came in aid of my mother's perplexities between delicacy 
and hardihood, between courage and conscientiousness. It 
assisted the cheerfulness I inherited from my father ; showed 
me that circumstances were not to crush a healthy gaiety, or 
the most masculine self-respect; and helped to supply me 
with the resolution of standing by a principle, not merely as 
a point of lowly or lofty sacrifice, but as a matter of common 
sense and duty, and a simple co-operation with the elements 
of natural welfare. 

I went, nevertheless, to school at Christ Hospital, an ultra- 
sympathizing and timid boy.* The sight of boys fighting, 
from which I had been so anxiously withheld, frightened me 
as something devilish; and the least threat of corporal 
chastisement to a schoolfellow (for the lesson I had learned 
would have enabled me to bear it myself) affected me to 
tears. I remember to this day, merely on that account, the 
name of a boy who was to receive punishment for some 
offence about a task. It was Lemoine. (I hereby present 
him with my respects, if he is an existing old gentleman, and 
hope he has not lost a pleasing countenance.) He had a cold 
and hoarseness ; and his voice, while pleading in mitigation, 
sounded to me so pathetic, that I wondered how the master 
could have the heart to strike him. 

Eeaders who have been at a public school may guess the 
consequence. I was not of a disposition to give offence, but 
neither was I quick to take it; and this, to the rude, energy- 
cultivating spirit of boys in general (not the worst thing in the 
world, till the pain in preparation for them can be diminished), 
was in itself an offence. I therefore " went to the wall," till 
address, and the rousing of my own spirit, tended to right me ; 

* In 1792. 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 47 

but I went through a great deal of fear in the process. I 
became convinced, that if I did not put moral courage in the 
place of personal, or, in other words, undergo any stubborn 
amount of pain and wretchedness, rather than submit to what 
I thought wrong, there was an end for ever, as far as I was 
concerned, of all those fine things that had been taught me, 
in vindication of right and justice. 

Whether it was, however, that by the help of animal 
spirits I possessed some portion of the courage for which the 
rest of the family was remarkable — or whether I was a 
veritable coward, born or bred, destined to show, in my 
person, how far a spirit of love and freedom could supersede 
the necessity of gall, and procure me the respect of those 
about me — certain it is, that although, except in one instance, 
I did my best to avoid, and succeeded honourably in avoid- 
ing, those personal encounters with my school-fellows, which, 
in confronting me on my own account with the face of a 
fellow-creature, threw me upon a sense of something devilish, 
and overwhelmed me with a sort of terror for both parties, 
yet I gained at an early period of boyhood the reputation of 
a romantic enthusiast, whose daring in behalf of a friend or a 
good cause nothing could put down. I was obliged to call in 
the aid of a feeling apart from my own sense of personal 
antagonism, and so merge the diabolical, as it were, into the 
human. In other words, I had not self-respect or gall enough 
to be angry on my own account, unless there was something 
at stake which, by concerning others, gave me a sense of 
support, and so pieced out my want with their abundance. 
The moment, however, that I felt thus supported, not only 
did all misgiving vanish from my mind, but contempt of pain 
took possession of my body ; and my poor mother might 
have gloried through her tears in the loving courage of her 
son. 

I state the case thus proudly, both in justice to the manner 
in which she trained me, and because I conceive it may do 
good. I never fought with a boy but once, and then it was 
on my own account ; but though I beat him I was frightened, 
and eagerly sought his good will. I dared everything, how- 
ever, from the biggest and strongest boys on other accounts, 
and was sometimes afforded an opportunity of showing my 
spirit of martyrdom. The truth is, I could suffer better than 
act ; for the utmost activity of martyrdom is supported by a 
certain sense of passiveness. We are not bold from our- 



48 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP "LEIGH HUKT. 

selves, but from something -which compels us to be so, and 
which supports us by a sense of the necessity. 

I had not been long in the school, when this spirit within 
me broke out in a manner that procured me great esteem. 
There was a monitor or " big boy " in office, who had a trick 
of entertaining himself by pelting lesser boys' heads with a 
hard ball. He used to throw it at this boy and that ; make 
the throwee bring it back to him ; and then send a rap with it 
on his cerebellum, as he was going off. 

I had borne this spectacle one day for some time, when the 
family precepts rising within me, I said to myself, "I must 
go up to the monitor and speak to him about this." I issued 
forth accordingly, and to the astonishment of all present, who 
had never witnessed such an act of insubordination, I said, 
" You have no right to do this." The monitor, more 
astounded than any one, exclaimed, " What ? " I repeated 
my remonstrance. He treated me with the greatest con- 
tempt, as if disdaining even to strike me ; and finished by 
ordering me to " stand out." " Standing out " meant going 
to a particular spot in the hall where we dined. I did so; 
but just as the steward (the master in that place) was enter- 
ing it, the monitor called to me to come away; and I neither 
heard any more of standing out, nor saw any more of the ball. 
I do not recollect that he even " spited" me afterwards, which 
must have been thought very remarkable. I seemed fairly to 
have taken aw T ay the breath of his calculations. The proba- 
bility is, that he was a good lad who had got a bad habit. 
Boys often become tyrants from a notion of its being grand 
and manly. 

Another monitor, a year or two afterwards, took it into his 
head to force me to be his fag. Fag was not the term at our 
school, though it was in our vocabulary. Fag, with us, 
meant eatables. The learned derived the word from the 
Greek phage), to eat. I had so little objection to serve out of 
love, that there is no office I could not have performed for 
good will ; but it had been given out that I had determined 
not to be a menial on any other terms, and the monitor in 
question undertook to bring me to reason. He was a mild, 
good-looking boy about fourteen, remarkable for the neat- 
ness, and even elegance, of his appearance. 

Eeceiving the refusal, for which he had been prepared, he 
showed me a knot in a long handkerchief, and told me I 
should receive a lesson from that handkerchief every day, 



SCHOOL-BAYS. 49 

with the addition of a fresh knot every time, unless I chose 
to alter my mind. I did not choose. I received the daily or 
rather nightly lesson, for it was then most convenient to strip 
me, and I came out of the ordeal in triumph. I never was 
fag to anybody; never made anybody's bed, or cleaned his 
shoes, or was the boy to get his tea, much less expected to 
stand as a screen for him before the fire, which I have seen 
done ; though, upon the whole, the boys were very mild 
governors. 

Lamb has noticed the character of the school for good 
manners, which he truly describes as being equally removed 
from the pride of aristocratic foundations and the servility of 
the charity schools. I believe it retains this character still ; 
though the changes which its system underwent not long ago, 
fusing all the schools into one another, and introducing a 
more generous diet, is thought by some not to have been 
followed by an advance in other respects. I have heard the 
school charged, more lately, with having been suffered, in the 
intervals between the school hours, to fall out of the liberal 
and gentlemanly supervision of its best teachers, into the 
hands of an officious and ignorant sectarianism. But this 
may only have been a passing abuse. 

I love and honour the school on private accounts; and I 
feel a public interest in its welfare, inasmuch as it is one of 
those judicious links with all classes, the importance of which, 
especially at a time like the present, cannot be too highly 
estimated; otherwise, I should have said nothing to its pos- 
sible, and I hope transient disadvantage. Queen Victoria 
recognized its importance, by visits and other personal con- 
descensions, long before the late changes in Europe could 
have diminished the grace of their bestowal ; and I will 
venture to say that every one of those attentions will have 
sown for her generous nature a crop of loyalty worth having. 

But for the benefit of such as are unacquainted with the 
city, or with a certain track of reading, I must give a more 
particular account of a school which in truth is a curiosity. 
Thousands of inhabitants of the metropolis have gone from 
west-end to east-end, and till the new hall was laid open 
to view by the alterations in Newgate Street, never suspected 
that in the heart of it lies an old cloistered foundation, where 
a boy may grow up as I did, among six hundred others, and 
know as little of the very neighbourhood as the world does 
of him. 

4 



50 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Perhaps there is not a foundation in the country so truly 
English, taking that word to mean what Englishmen wish it 
to mean — something solid, unpretending, of good character, 
and free to all. More boys are to be found in it, who issue 
from a greater variety of ranks, than in any school in the 
kingdom; and as it is the most various, so it is the largest, 
of all the free schools. Nobility do not go there, except as 
boarders. Now and then a boy of a noble family may be 
met with, and he is reckoned an interloper, and against the 
charter ; but the sons of poor gentry and London citizens 
abound ; and with them an equal share is given to the sons 
of tradesmen of the very humblest description, not omitting 
servants. I would not take my oath — but I have a strong 
recollection, that in my time there were two boys, one of 
whom went up into the drawing-room to his father, the 
master of the house; and the other, down into the kitchen 
to his father, the coachman. One thing, however, I know to 
be certain, and it is the noblest of all, namely, that the boys 
themselves (at least it was so in my time) had no sort of 
feeling of the difference of one another's ranks out of doors. 
The cleverest boy was the noblest, let his father be who he 
might. Christ Hospital is a nursery of tradesmen, of mer- 
chants, of naval officers, of scholars; it has produced some 
of the greatest ornaments of their time; and the feeling 
among the boys themselves is, that it is a medium between 
the patrician pretension of such schools as Eton and West- 
minster, and the plebeian submission of the charity schools. 
In point of university honours it claims to be equal with the 
best ; and though other schools can show a greater abundance 
of eminent names, I know not where many will be found who 
are a greater host in themselves. One original author is 
worth a hundred transmitters of elegance: and such a one is 
to be found in Eichardson, who here received what education 
he possessed. Here Camden also received the rudiments of 
his. Bishop Stillingfleet, according to the Memoirs of Pepys, 
was brought up in the school. We have had many eminent 
scholars, two of them Greek professors, to wit, Barnes and 
Scholefield, the latter of whom attained an extraordinary suc- 
cession of university honours. The rest are Markland; Mid- 
dleton, late Bishop of Calcutta; and Mitchell, the translator 
of Aristophanes. Christ Hospital, I believe, towards the close 
of the last century, and the beginning of the present, sent out 
more living writers, in its proportion, than any other school. 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 51 

There was Dr. Richards, author of the Aboriginal Britons ; 
Dyer, whose life was one unbroken dream of learning and 
goodness, and who used to make us wonder with passing 
through the school-room (where no other person in "town 
clothes" ever appeared) to consult books in the library; 
Le Grice, the translator of Longus ; Home, author of some 
well-known productions in controversial divinity ; Surr, the 
novelist (not in the Grammar School) ; James White, the 
friend of Charles Lamb, and not unworthy of him, author 
of Falstaff's Letters (this was he who used to give an anni- 
versary dinner to the chimney-sweepers, merrier than, though 
not so magnificent as Mrs. Montague's) ; Pitman, a celebrated 
preacher, editor of some school-books and religious classics 
(also a veritable man of wit) ; Mitchell, before mentioned; 
myself, who stood next him ; Barnes, who came next, the 
Editor of the Times, than whom no man (if he had cared for 
it) could have been more certain of attaining celebrity for 
wit and literature; Townsend, a prebendary of Durham, 
author of Armageddon, and several theological works (it was 
he who went to see the Pope, in the hope of persuading him 
to concede points towards the amalgamation of the Papal and 
Protestant Churches); Gilly, another of the Durham preben- 
daries, an amiable man, who wrote the Narrative of the Wal~ 
denses ; Scargill, a Unitarian minister, author of some tracts 
on Peace and War, &c; and lastly, whom I have kept by 
way of climax, Coleridge and Charles Lamb, two of the most 
original geniuses, not only of the day, but of the country. 

In the time of Henry the Eighth Christ Hospital was a 
monastery of Franciscan friars. Being dissolved among the 
others, Edward the Sixth, moved by a sermon of Bishop 
Ridley's, assigned the revenues of it to the maintenance and 
education of a certain number of poor orphan children, born 
of citizens of London. I believe there has been no law passed 
to alter the letter of this intention ; which is a pity, since the 
alteration has taken place. An extension of it was probably 
very good, and even demanded by circumstances. I have 
reason, for one, to be grateful for it. But tampering with 
matters-of-fact among children is dangerous. They soon 
learn to distinguish between allowed poetical fiction and 
that which they are told, under severe penalties, never to 
be guilty of; and this early sample of contradiction between 
the thing asserted and the obvious fact, can do no good even 
in an establishment so plain-dealing in other respects as Christ 

4—2 



52 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Hospital. The place is not only designated as an Orphan- 
house in its Latin title, but the boys, in the prayers which 
they repeat every day, implore the pity of heaven upon " us 
poor orphans." I remember the perplexity this caused me at 
a very early period. It is true, the word orphan may be 
used in a sense implying destitution of any sort; but this 
w T as not its Christ Hospital intention ; nor do the younger boys 
give it' the benefit of that scholarly interpretation. There was 
another thing (now, I believe, done away) which existed in my 
time, and perplexed me still more. It seemed a glaring instance 
of the practice likely to result from the other assumption, 
and made me prepare for a hundred falsehoods and deceptions, 
which, mixed up with contradiction, as most things in society 
are, I sometimes did find, and oftener dreaded. I allude to a 
foolish custom they had in the ward which I first entered, 
and which was the only one that the company at the public 
suppers were in the habit of going into, of hanging up, by 
the side of each bed, a clean white napkin, which was sup- 
posed to be the one used by the occupiers. Now these nap- 
kins were only for show, the real towels being of the largest 
and coarsest kind. If the masters had been asked about them, 
they would doubtless have told the truth ; perhaps the nurses 
would have done so. But the boys were not aware of this. 
There they saw these " white lies " hanging before them, a 
conscious imposition; and I well remember how alarmed I 
used to feel, lest any of the company should direct their 
inquiries to me. 

Christ Hospital (for this is its proper name, and not Christ's 
Hospital) occupies a considerable portion of ground between 
Newgate Street, Giltspur Street, St. Bartholomew's, and 
Little Britain. There is a quadrangle with cloisters; and 
the square inside the cloisters is called the Garden, and most 
likely was the monastery garden. Its only delicious crop, for 
many years, has been pavement. Another large area, pre- 
senting the Grammar and Navigation Schools, is also mis- 
nomered the Ditch ; the town-ditch having formerly run that 
way. In Newgate Street is seen the Hall, or eating-room, 
one of the noblest in England, adorned with enormously long 
paintings by Verrio and others, and with an organ. A por- 
tion of the old quadrangle once contained the library of the 
monks, and was built or repaired by the famous Whittington, 
whose arms were to be seen outside; but alterations of late 
years have done it away. 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 53 

In the cloisters a number of persons lie buried, besides 
the officers of the house. Among them is Isabella, wife of 
Edward the Second, the " She-wolf of France." I was not 
aware of this circumstance then ; but many a time, with a 
recollection of some lines in " Blair's Grave " upon me, have I 
run as hard as I could at night-time from my ward to an- 
other, in order to borrow the next volume of some ghostly 
romance. In one of the cloisters was an impression resem- 
bling a gigantic foot, which was attributed by some to the 
angry stamping of the ghost of a beadle's wife ! A beadle 
was a higher sound to us than to most, as it involved ideas 
of detected apples in churchtime, " skulking " (as it was 
called) out of bounds, and a power of reporting us to the 
masters. But fear does not stand upon rank and ceremony. 

The wards, or sleeping-rooms, are twelve, and contained, 
in my time, rows of beds on each side, partitioned off, but 
connected with one another, and each having two boys to 
sleep in it. Down the middle ran the binns for holding 
bread and other things, and serving for a table when the meal 
was not taken in the hall ; and over the binns hung a great 
homely chandelier. 

To each of these wards a nurse was assigned, who was the 
widow of some decent liveryman of London, and who had the 
charge of looking after us at night-time, seeing to our wash- 
ing, &c, and carving for us at dinner: all of which gave her 
a good deal of power, more than her name warranted. The 
nurses, however, were almost invariably very decent people, 
and performed their duty; which was not always the case 
with the young ladies, their daughters. There were five 
schools ; a grammar-school, a mathematical or navigation- 
school (added by Charles the Second, through the zeal of 
Mr. Pepys), a writing, a drawing, and a reading school. 
Those who could not read when they came on the foundation, 
went into the last. There were few in the last-but -one, and 
I scarcely know what they did, or for what object. The 
writing-school was for those who were intended for trade 
and commerce; the mathematical, for boys who went as mid- 
shipmen into the naval and East India service ; and the 
grammar-school for such as were designed for the Church, 
and to go to the University. The writing-school was by far 
the largest; and, what is very curious (it has been altered 
since), all the schools were kept quite distinct; so that a boy 
might arrive at the age of fifteen in the grammar school, and 



54 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

not know his multiplication-table ; which was the case with 
myself. Nor do I know it to this day ! Shades of Horace, 
Walpole, and Lord Lyttelton ! come to my assistance, and 
enable me to bear the confession : but so it is. The fault 
was not my fault at the time ; but I ought to have repaired 
it when I went out in the world; and great is the mischief 
which it has done me. 

Most of these schools had several masters; besides whom 
there was a steward, who took care of our subsistence, and 
who had a general superintendence over all hours and cir- 
cumstances not connected with teaching. The masters had 
almost all been in the school, and might expect pensions or 
livings in their old age. Among those in my time, the 
mathematical master was Mr. Wales, a man well known for 
his science, who had been round the world with Captain 
Cook ; for which we highly venerated him. He was a good 
man, of plain, simple manners, with a heavy large person and 
a benign countenance. When he was at Otaheite, the natives 
played him a trick while bathing, and stole his small-clothes; 
which we used to think a liberty scarcely credible. The 
name of the steward, a thin stiff man of invincible formality 
of demeanour, admirably fitted to render encroachment im 
possible, was Hathaway. We of the grammar-school used 
to call him " the Yeoman," on account of Shakspeare havin 
married the daughter of a man of that name, designated as " a 
substantial yeoman.' ' 

Our dress was of the coarsest and quaintest kind, but wai 
respected out of doors, and is so. It consisted of a blu< 
drugget gown, or body, with ample skirts to it ; a yellow vest 
underneath in winter-time ; small-clothes of Eussia duck ; 
worsted yellow stockings; a leathern girdle; and a littL 
black worsted cap, usually carried in the hand. I believe it 
was the ordinary dress of children in humble life during the 
reign of the Tudors. We used to flatter ourselves that it was 
taken from the monks ; and there went a monstrous tradition 
that at one period it consisted of blue velvet with silvei 
buttons. It was said, also, that during the blissful era of th( 
blue velvet, we had roast mutton for supper; but that the 
small-clothes not being then in existence, and the mutton 
suppers too luxurious, the eatables were given up for the 
ineffables. 

A malediction, at heart, always followed the memory o1 
him who had taken upon himself to decide so preposterously. 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 55 

To say the truth, we were not too well fed at that time, either 
in quantity or quality; and we could not enter with our 
hungry imaginations into these remote philosophies. Our 
breakfast was bread and water, for the beer was too bad to 
drink. The bread consisted of the half of a three-halfpenny 
loaf, according to the prices then current. This was not much 
for growing boys, who had had nothing to eat from six or 
seven o'clock the preceding evening, For dinner we had the 
same quantity of bread, with meat only every other day, and 
that consisting of a small slice, such as would be given to an 
infant three or four years old. Yet even that, with all our 
hunger, we very often left half-eaten — the meat was so tough. 
On the other days we had a milk-porridge, ludicrously thin; 
or rice -milk, which was better. There were no vegetables or 
puddings. Once a month we had roast beef; and twice a 
year (I blush to think of the eagerness with which it was 
looked for!) a dinner of pork. One was roast, and the other 
boiled ; and on the latter occasion we had our only pudding, 
which was of peas. I blush to remember this, not on 
account of our poverty, but on account of the sordidness of 
the custom. There had much better have been none. For 
supper we had a like piece of bread, with butter or cheese ; 
and then to bed, " with what appetite we might." 

Our routine of life was this. We rose to the call of a bell, 
at six in summer, and seven in winter; and after combing 
ourselves, and washing our hands and faces, went, at the call 
of another bell, to breakfast. All this took up about an hour. 
From breakfast we proceeded to school, where we remained 
till eleven, winter and summer, and then had an hour's play. 
Dinner took place at twelve. Afterwards was a little play 
till one, when we again went to school, and remained till five 
in summer and four in winter. At six was the supper. We 
used to play after it in summer till eight. In winter, we 
proceeded from supper to bed. On Sundays, the school-time 
of the other days was occupied in church, both morning 
and evening ; and as the Bible was read to us every day 
before every meal, and on going to bed, besides prayers 
and graces, we rivalled the monks in the religious part of our 
duties. 

The effect was certainly not what was intended. The 
Bible, perhaps, was read thus frequently, in the first instance, 
out of contradiction to the papal spirit that had so long kept 
it locked up; but, in the eighteenth century, the repetition 



56 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

was not so desirable among a parcel of hungry boys, anxious 
to get their modicum to eat. On Sunday, what with the long 
service in the morning, the service again after dinner, and the 
inaudible and indifferent tones of some of the preachers, it 
was unequivocally tiresome. I, for one, who had been piously 
brought up, and continued to have religion inculcated on me 
by father and mother, began secretly to become as indifferent 
as I thought the preachers; and, though the morals of the 
school were in the main excellent and exemplary, we all felt, 
without knowing it, that it was the orderliness and example of 
the general system that kept us so, and not the religious part 
of it, which seldom entered our heads at all, and only tired us 
when it did. 

I am not begging any question here, or speaking for or 
against. I am only stating a fact. Others may argue that, 
however superfluous the readings and prayers might have 
been, a good general spirit of religion must have been incul- 
cated, because a great deal of virtue and religious charity is 
known to have issued out of that school, and no fanaticism. 
I shall not dispute the point. The case is true ; but not the 
less true is what I speak of. Latterly there came, as our 
parish clergyman, Mr. Crowther, a nephew of our famous 
Richardson, and worthy of the talents and virtues of his 
kinsman, though inclining to a mode of faith which is sup- 
posed to produce more faith than charity. But, till then, the 
persons wdio were in the habit of getting up in our church 
pulpit and reading-desk, might as well have hummed a tune 
to their diaphragms. They inspired us with nothing but 
mimicry. The name of the morning reader was Salt. He 
was a worthy man, I believe, and might, for aught Ave knew, 
have been a clever one ; but he had it all to himself. He 
spoke in his throat, with a sound as if he were weak and cor- 
pulent; and was famous among us for saying "murracles" 
instead of " miracles." When we imitated him, this was the 
only word w r e drew upon : the rest was unintelligible suffoca- 
tion. Our usual evening preacher was Mr. Sandiford, who 
had the reputation of learning and piety. It was of no use 
to us, except to make us associate the ideas of learning and 
piety in the pulpit with inaudible humdrum. Mr. Sandiford's 
voice was hollow and low ; and he had a habit of dipping up 
and down over his book, like a chicken drinking. Mr. Salt 
was eminent for a single word. Mr. Sandiford surpassed him, 
for he had two audible phrases. There was, it is true, no 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 57 

great variety in them. One was " the dispensation of Moses ;" 
the other (with a due interval of hum), " the Mosaic dispen- 
sation." These he used to repeat so often, that in our cari- 
catures of him they sufficed for an entire portrait. The reader 
may conceive a large church (it was Christ Church, Newgate 
Street), with six hundred boys, seated like charity-children 
up in the air, on each side of the organ, Mr. Sandiford hum- 
ming in the valley, and a few maid-servants who formed his 
afternoon congregation. We did not dare to go to sleep. 
We were not allowed to read. The great boys used to get 
those that sat behind them to play with their hair. Some 
whispered to their neighbours, and the others thought of their 
lessons and tops. I can safely say, that many of us would 
have been good listeners, and most of us attentive ones, if the 
clergyman could have been heard. As it was, I talked as well 
as the rest, or thought of my exercise. Sometimes we could 
not help joking and laughing over our weariness ; and then 
the fear was, lest the steward had seen us. It was part of the 
business of the steward to preside over the boys in church- 
time. He sat aloof, in a place where he could view the whole 
of his flock. There was a ludicrous kind of revenge we had 
of him, whenever a particular part of the Bible was read. 
This was the parable of the Unjust Steward. The boys waited 
anxiously till the passage commenced; and then, as if by a 
general conspiracy, at the words " thou unjust steward," the 
whole school turned their eyes upon this unfortunate officer, 
who sat 

" Like Teneriff or Atlas tmrcmoved." 
We persuaded ourselves, that the more unconscious he looked,, 
the more he was acting. 

By a singular chance, there were two clergymen, occasional 
preachers in our pulpit, who were as loud and startling as the 
others were somniferous. One of them, with a sort of flat, 
high voice, had a remarkable way of making a ladder of it, 
climbing higher and higher to the end of the sentence. It 
ought to be described by the gamut, or written up-hill. Per- 
haps it was an association of ideas, that has made me recollect 
one particular passage. It is where Ahab consults the pro- 
phets, asking them whether he shall go up to Ramoth Gilead 
to battle. " Shall I go against Ramoth Gilead to battle, or 
shall I forbear ? and they said, Go up ; for the Lord shall 
deliver it into the hand of the king." He used to give this 
out in such a manner, that you might have fancied him climb- 



58 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUM. 

ing out of the pulpit, sword in hand. The other was a tall 
thin man, with a noble voice. He would commence a prayer 
in a most stately and imposing manner, full both of dignity 
and feeling ; and then, as if tired of it, would hurry over all 
the rest. Indeed, he began every prayer in this way, and was 
as sure to hurry it ; for which reason, the boys hailed the 
sight of him, as they knew they should get sooner out of 
church. When he commenced, in his noble style, the band 
seemed to tremble against his throat, as though it had been 
a sounding-board. 

Being able to read, and knowing a little Latin, I was put 
at once into the Under Grammar School. How much time I 
wasted there in learning the accidence and syntax, I cannot 
say ; but it seems to me a long while. My grammar seemed 
always to open at the same place. Things are managed dif- 
ferently now, I believe, in this as well as in many other re- 
spects. Great improvements have been made in the whole 
establishment. The boys feed better, learn better, and have 
longer holidays in the country. In my time, they never slept 
out of the school, but on one occasion, during the whole of 
their stay ; this was for three weeks in summer-time, which 
they were bound to pass at a certain distance from London. 
They now have these holidays w r ith a reasonable frequency ; 
and they all go to the different schools, instead of being con- 
fined, as they were then, some to nothing but writing and 
cyphering, and some to the languages. It has been doubted 
by some of us elders, whether this system will beget such 
temperate, proper students, with pale faces, as the other did. 
I dare say, our successors are not afraid of us. I had the 
pleasure, some years since, of dining in company with a Deputy 
Grecian, who, with a stout rosy-faced person, had not failed 
to acquire the scholarly turn for joking which is common to 
a classical education ; as well as those simple, becoming man- 
ners, made up of modesty and proper confidence, which have 
been often remarked as distinguishing the boys on this foun- 
dation. 

" But what is a Deputy Grecian?" Ah, reader ! to ask 
that question, and at the same time to know anything at all 
worth knowdng, would at one time, according to our notion of 
things, have been impossible. When I entered the school, 
I was shown three gigantic boys, young men rather (for the 
eldest was between seventeen and eighteen), who, I was told, 
were going to the University. These were the Grecians. 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 59 

They were the three head boys of the Grammar School, and 
were understood to have their destiny fixed for the Church. 
The next class to these, like a College of Cardinals to those 
three Popes (for every Grecian was in our eyes infallible), 
were the Deputy Grecians. The former were supposed to 
have completed their Greek studies, and were deep in Sophocles 
and Euripides. The latter were thought equally competent 
to tell you anything respecting Homer and Demosthenes. 
These two classes, and the head boys of the Navigation School, 
held a certain rank over the whole place, both in school and 
out. Indeed, the whole of the Navigation School, upon the 
strength of cultivating their valour for the navy, and being 
called King's Boys, had succeeded in establishing an extra- 
ordinary pretension to respect. This they sustained in a 
manner as laughable to call to mind as it was grave in its 
reception. It was an etiquette among them never to move 
out of a right line as they walked, whoever stood in their 
way. I believe there was a secret understanding with Grecians 
and Deputy Grecians, the former of whom were unquestionably 
lords paramount in point of fact, and stood and walked aloof 
when all the rest of the school were marshalled in bodies. I 
do not remember any clashing between these civil and naval 
powers; but I remember well my astonishment when I first 
beheld some of my little comrades overthrown by the pro- 
gress of one of these very straightforward marine personages, 
who walked on with as tranquil and unconscious a face as if 
nothing had happened. It was not a fierce-looking push ; 
there seemed to be no intention in it. The insolence lay in the 
boy not appearing to know that such inferior creatures existed. 
It was always thus, wherever he came. If aware, the boys 
got out of his way ; if not, down they went, one or more ; 
away rolled the top or the marbles, and on walked the future 
captain — 

" In maiden navigation, frank and free." 
These boys wore a badge on the shoulder, of which they were 
very proud ; though in the streets it must have helped to con- 
found them with charity boys. For charity boys, I must own, 
we all had a great contempt, or thought so. We did not dare 
to know that there might have been a little jealousy of our 
own position in it, placed as we were midway between the 
homeliness of the common charity-school and the dignity of 
the foundations. We called them " chizzjf-wacjs" and had a 
particular scorn and hatred of their nasal tone in singing. 



60 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT, 

The under grammar-master, in my time, was the Rev. 
Mr. Field. He was a good-looking man, very gentlemanly, 
and always dressed at the neatest. I believe he once wrote a 
play. He had the reputation of being admired by the ladies. 
A man of a more handsome incompetence for his situation 
perhaps did not exist. He came late of a morning ; went 
away soon in the afternoon; and used to walk up and down, 
languidly bearing his cane, as if it were a lily, and hearing 
our eternal Dominuses and As in prcesentis with an air of 
ineffable endurance. Often he did not hear at all. It was a 
joke with us, when any of our friends came to the door, and we 
asked his permission to go to them, to address him with some 
preposterous question wide of the mark ; to which he used to 
assent. We would say, for instance, " Are you not a great 
fool, sir ?" or, " Isn't your daughter a pretty girl?" to which 
he would reply, " Yes, child." When he condescended to hit 
us with the cane, he made a face as if he were taking physic. 
Miss Field, an agreeable-looking girl, was one of the goddesses 
of the school ; as far above us as if she had lived on Olympus. 
Another was Miss Patrick, daughter of the lamp-manufacturer 
in Newgate Street. I do not remember her face so well, not 
seeing it so often; but she abounded in admirers. I write the 
names of these ladies at full length, because there is nothing 
that should hinder their being pleased at having caused us so 
many agreeable visions. We used to identify them with the 
picture of Yenus in Tooke's Pantheon. 

The other master, the upper one, Boyer — famous for the 
mention of him by Coleridge and Lamb — was a short stout 
man, inclining to punchiness, with large face and hands, an 
aquiline nose, long upper lip, and a sharp mouth. His eye 
was close and cruel. The spectacles which he wore threw a 
balm over it. Being a clergyman, he dressed in black, with 
a powdered wig. His clothes were cut short; his hands 
hung out of the sleeves, with tight wristbands, as if ready for 
execution ; and as he generally wore gray worsted stockings, 
very tight, with a little balustrade leg, his whole appearance 
presented something formidably succinct, hard, and mechani- 
cal. In fact, his weak side, and undoubtedly his natural 
destination, lay in carpentry ; and he accordingly carried, in a 
side-pocket made on purpose, a carpenter's rule. 

The merits of Boyer consisted in his being a good verbal 
scholar, and conscientiously acting up to the letter of time 
and attention. I have seen him nod at the close of the long 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 61 

summer school-hours, wearied out ; and I should have pitied 
him if he had taught us to do anything but fear. Though a 
clergyman, very orthodox, and of rigid morals, he indulged 
himself in an oath, which was " God's-my-life ! " When 
you were out in your lesson, he turned upon you a round 
staring eye like a fish ; and he had a trick of pinching you 
under the chin, and by the lobes of the ears, till he would 
make the blood come. He has many times lifted a boy off 
the ground in this way. He was, indeed, a proper tyrant, 
passionate and capricious; would take violent likes and dis- 
likes to the same boys ; fondle some without any apparent 
reason, though he had a leaning to the servile, and, perhaps, 
to the sons of rich people ; and he would persecute others in a 
manner truly frightful. I have seen him beat a sickly- 
looking, melancholy boy (C n) about the head and ears, 

till the poor fellow, hot, dry-eyed, and confused, seemed lost 

in bewilderment. C n, not long after he took orders, died, 

out of his senses. I do not attribute that catastrophe to the 
master ; and of course he could not wish to do him any last- 
ing mischief. He had no imagination of any sort. But 
there is no saying how far his treatment of the boy might 
have contributed to prevent a cure. Tyrannical school- 
masters nowadays are to be found, perhaps, exclusively in 
such inferior schools as those described with such masterly 
and indignant edification by my friend Charles Dickens ; but 
they formerly seemed to have abounded in all ; and masters, 
as well as boys, have escaped the chance of many bitter 
reflections, since a wiser and more generous intercourse has 
come up between them. 

I have some stories of Boyer that will completely show his 
character, and at the same time relieve the reader's indigna- 
tion by something ludicrous in their excess. We had a few 
boarders at the school : boys whose parents were too rich to 
let them go on the foundation. Among them, in my time, 
was Carlton, a son of Lord Dorchester ; Macdonald, one of 

the Lord. Chief Baron's sons ; and E , the son of a rich 

merchant. Carlton, who was a fine fellow, manly and full of 
good sense, took his new master and his caresses very coolly, 
and did not want them. Little Macdonald also could dis- 
pense with them, and would put on his delicate gloves after 
lesson, with an air as if he resumed his patrician plumage. 

R was meeker, and willing to be encouraged ; and there 

would the master sit, with his arm round his tall waist, 



62 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT, 

helping him to his Greek verbs, as a nurse does bread and 
milk to an infant ; and repeating them, when he missed, with 
a fond patience, that astonished us criminals in drugget. 

Very different was the treatment of a boy on the founda- 
tion, whose friends, by some means or other, had prevailed on 
the master to pay him an extra attention, and try to get him 
on. He had come into the school at an age later than usual, 
and could hardly read. There was a book used by the 
learners in reading, called Dialogues between a Missionary 
and an Indian. It was a poor performance, full of incon- 
clusive arguments and other commonplaces. The boy in 
question used to appear with this book in his hand in the 
middle of the school, the master standing behind him. The 

lesson was to begin. Poor , whose great fault lay in a 

deep-toned drawl of his syllables and the omission of his 
stops, stood half looking at the book, and half casting his eye 
towards the right of him, whence the blows were to proceed. 
The master looked over him, and his hand was ready. I am 
not exact in my quotation at this distance of time ; but the 
spirit of one of the passages that I recollect was to the 
following purport, and thus did the teacher and his pupil 
proceed: — 

Master. — " Now, young man, have a care ; or I'll set you a 
swingeing task." (A common phrase of his.) 

Pupil. — (Making a sort of heavy bolt at his calamity, and 
never remembering his stop at the word Missionary.) " Mis- 
sionary Can you see the wind ? " 

(Master gives him a slap on the cheek.) 

Pupil. — (Raising his voice to a cry, and still forgetting his 
stop.) " Indian No ! " 

Master. — " God's-my-life, young man ! have a care how 
you provoke me ! " 

Pupil. — (Always forgetting the stop.) " Missionary How 
then do you know that there is such a thing ? " 

(Here a terrible thump.) 

Pupil. — (With a shout of agony.) " Indian Because I 
feel it." 

One anecdote of his injustice will suffice for all. It is 
of ludicrous enormity; nor do I believe anything more fla- 
grantly wilful was ever done by himself. I heard Mr. C , 

the sufferer, now a most respectable person in a Government 
office, relate it with a due relish, long after quitting the 
school. The master was in the habit of "spiting" C — - — ; 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 63 

that is to say, of taking every opportunity to be severe with 
him; nobody knew why. One day he comes into the school, 
and finds him placed in the middle of it with three other 
boys. He was not in one of his worst humours, and did not 
seem inclined to punish them, till he saw his antagonist. 
"Oh, oh ! sir," said he: "what ! you are among them, are 
you ? " and gave him an exclusive thump on the face. He 
then turned to one of the Grecians, and said, "I have not 
time to nog all these boys ; make them draw lots, and I'll 
punish one. 7 ' The lots were drawn, and C 's was favour- 
able. "Oh, oh!" returned the master, when he saw them, 
" you have escaped, have you, sir ? " and pulling out his 
watch, and turning again to the Grecian, observed, that he 
found he had time to punish the whole three ; " and, sir," 

added he to C , with another slap, " I'll begin with you. 

He then took the boy into the library and flogged him; and, 
on issuing forth again, had the face to say, with an air of 
indifference, " I have not time, after all, to punish these two 
other boys ; let them take care how they provoke me another 
time." 

Often did I wish that I were a fairy, in order to play him 
tricks like a Caliban. We used to sit and fancy what we 
should do with his wig ; how we would hamper and vex him ; 
" put knives in his pillow, and halters in his pew." To 
venture on a joke in our own mortal persons, was like playing 
with Polyphemus. One afternoon, when he was nodding 
with sleep over a lesson, a boy of the name of Meader, who 
stood behind him, ventured to take a pin, and begin ad- 
vancing with it up his wig. The hollow, exhibited between 
the wig and the nape of the neck, invited him. The boys 
encouraged this daring act of gallantry. Nods and becks, 
and then whispers of "Go it, M. ! " gave more and more 
valour to his hand. On a sudden, the master's head falls 
back ; he starts with eyes like a shark ; and seizing the 
unfortunate culprit, who stood helpless in the act of holding 
the pin, caught hold of him, fiery with passion. A " swinge- 
ing task " ensued, which kept him at home all the holidays. 
One of these tasks would consist of an impossible quantity of 
Virgil, which the learner, unable to retain it at once, wasted 
his heart and soul out " to get up," till it was too late. 

Sometimes, however, our despot got into a dilemma, and 
then he did not know how to get out of it. A boy, now and 
then, would be roused into open and fierce remonstrance. I 



64 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. 

recollect S., afterwards one of the mildest of preachers, start- 
ing up in his place, and pouring forth on his astonished hearer 
a torrent of invectives and threats, which the other could only 
answer by looking pale, and uttering a few threats in return. 
Nothing came of it. He did not like such matters to go 
before the governors. Another time, Favell, a Grecian, a 
youth of high spirit, whom he had struck, went to the school- 
door, opened it, and, turning round with the handle in his 
grasp, told him he would never set foot again in the place, 
unless he promised to treat him with more delicacy. " Come 
back, child ; come back ! " said the other, pale, and in a faint 
voice. There was a dead silence. Favell came back, and 
nothing more was done. 

A sentiment, unaccompanied with something practical, 
would have been lost upon him. D , who went after- 
wards to the Military College at Woolwich, played him a 
trick, apparently between jest and earnest, which amused us 
exceedingly. He was to be flogged; and the dreadful door 
of the library was approached. (They did not invest the 
books with flowers, as Montaigne recommends.) Down falls 
the criminal, and twisting himself about the master's legs, 
which he does the more when the other attempts to move, 
repeats without ceasing, " Oh, good God ! consider my father, 
sir ; my father, sir ; you know my father ! " The point was felt 

to be getting ludicrous, and was given up. P , now a 

popular preacher, was in the habit of entertaining the boys 
that way. He was a regular wag; and would snatch his 
jokes out of the very flame and fury of the master, like snap- 
dragon. Whenever the other struck him, P. would get up ; 
and, half to avoid the blows, and half render them ridiculous, 
begin moving about the school-room, making all sorts of 
antics. When he w^as struck in the face, he would clap his 
hand with affected vehemence to the place, and cry as rapidly, 
" Ohy Lord ! " If the blow came on the arm, he would grasp 
his arm, with a similar exclamation. The master would then 
| go, driving and kicking him ; while the patient accompanied 
I every blow with the same comments and illustrations, making 
faces to us by way of index. 

What a bit of a golden age was it, when the Kev. Mr- 
Steevens, one of the under grammar-masters, took his place, 
on some occasion, for a short time ! Steevens was short and 
fat, with a handsome, cordial face. You loved him as you 
looked at him; and seemed as if you should love him the 






SCHOOL-DAYS. G5 

more the fatter he became. I stammered when I was at that 
time of life : which was an infirmity that used to get me into 
terrible trouble with the master. Steevens used to say, on 
the other hand, "Here comes our little black-haired friend, 
who stammers so. Now, let us see what we can do for him.' 7 
The consequence was, I did not hesitate half so much as with 
the other. When I did, it was out of impatience to please 
him. 

Such of us were not liked the better by the master as 
were in favour with his wife. She was a sprightly, good- 
looking woman, with black eyes ; and was beheld with trans- 
port by the boys, whenever she appeared at the school-door. 
Her husband's name, uttered in a mingled tone of good-nature 
and imperativeness, brought him down from his seat with 
smiling haste. Sometimes he did not return. On entering 
the school one day, he found a boy eating cherries. " Where 
did you get those cherries ? " exclaimed he, thinking the boy 
had nothing to say for himself. " Mrs. Boyer gave them me, 
sir." He turned away, scowling with disappointment. 

Speaking of fruit, reminds me of a pleasant trait on the 
part of a Grecian of the name of Le Grice. He was the mad- 
dest of ail the great boys in my time ; clever, full of address, 
and not hampered with modesty. Eemote humours, not 
lightly to be heard, fell on our ears, respecting pranks of his 
amongst the nurses' daughters. He had a fair handsome face, 
with delicate aquiline nose, and twinkling eyes. I remember 
his astonishing me when I was " a new boy," with sending me 
for a bottle of water, which he proceeded to pour down the 
back of G., a grave Deputy Grecian. On the master asking 
him one day why he, of all the boys, had given up no exer- 
cise (it was a particular exercise that they were bound to do 
in the course of a long set of holidays), he said he had had 
" a lethargy." The extreme impudence of this puzzled the 
master ; and, I believe, nothing came of it. But what I 
alluded to about the fruit was this. Le Grice was in the 
habit of eating apples in school-time, for which he had been 
often rebuked. One day, having particularly pleased the 
master, the latter, who was eating apples himself, and who 
would now and then with great ostentation present a boy 
with some halfpenny token of his mansuetude, called out to 
his favourite of the moment, " Le Grice, here is an apple 
for you." Le Grice, who felt his dignity hurt as a Grecian, 
but was more pleased at having this opportunity of mortify- 

5 



66 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

ing his reprover, replied, with an exquisite tranquillity of 
assurance, " Sir, I never eat apples." For this, among other 
things, the boys adored him. Poor fellow ! He and Favell 
(who, though very generous, was said to be a little too 
sensible of an humble origin) wrote to the Duke of York, 
when they were at College, for commissions in the army. 
The Duke good-naturedly sent them. Le Grice died in the 
West Indies. Favell was killed in one of the battles in Spain, 
but not before he had distinguished himself as an officer and 
a gentleman. 

The Upper Grammar School was divided into four classes 
or forms. The two under ones were called Little and Great 
Erasmus; the two upper were occupied by the Grecians and 
Deputy Grecians. We used to think the title of Erasmus 
taken from the great scholar of that name ; but the sudden 
appearance of a portrait among us, bearing to be the likeness 
of a certain Erasmus Smith, Esq., shook us terribly in this 
opinion, and was a hard trial of our gratitude. We scarcely 
relished this perpetual company of our benefactor, watch- 
ing us, as he seemed to do, with his omnipresent eyes. I 
believe he was a rich merchant, and that the forms of Little 
and Great Erasmus were really named after him. It was but 
a poor consolation to think that he himself, or his great-uncle, 
might have been named after Erasmus. Little Erasmus 
learned Ovid ; Great Erasmus, Virgil, Terence, and the Greek 
Testament. The Deputy Grecians were in Homer, Cicero, 
and Demosthenes; the Grecians, in the Greek plays and the 
mathematics. 

When a boy entered the Upper School, he was understood 
to be in the road to the University, provided he had inclina- 
tion and talents for it ; but, as only one Grecian a year went 
to College, the drafts out of Great and Little Erasmus into the 
writing-school were numerous. A few also became Deputy 
Grecians without going farther, and entered the w T orld from 
that form. Those who became Grecians always went to 
the University, though not always into the Church; which 
was reckoned a departure from the contract. When I first 
came to school, at seven years old, the names of the Grecians 
were Allen, Favell, Thomson, and Le Grice, brother of the 
Le Grice above mentioned, and now a clergyman in Cornwall. 
Charles Lamb had lately been Deputy Grecian ; and Coleridge 
had left for the University. 

The master, inspired by his subject with an eloquence be- 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 67 

yond himself, once called him, "that sensible fool, Colleridge," 
pronouncing the word like a dactyl. Coleridge must have 
alternately delighted and bewildered him. The compliment, 
as to the bewildering was returned, if not the delight. The 
pupil, I am told, said he dreamt of the master all his life, and 
that his dreams were horrible. A bon-mot of his is recorded, 
very characteristic both of pupil and master. Coleridge, when 
he heard of his death, said, " It was lucky that the cherubim 
who took him to heaven were nothing but faces and wings, 
or he would infallibly have flogged them by the way." This 
was his esoterical opinion of him. His outward and subtler 
opinion, or opinion exoterical, he favoured the public with in 
his Literary Life. He praised him, among other things, for 
his good taste in poetry, and his not suffering the boys to get 
into the commonplaces of Castalian Streams, Invocations to 
the Muses, &c. Certainly, there were no such things in our 
days — at least, to the best of my remembrance. But I do not 
think the master saw through them, out of a perception of 
anything further. His objection to a commonplace must have 
been itself commonplace. 

I do not remember seeing Coleridge when I was a child. 
Lamb's visits to the school, after he left it, I remember well, 
with his fine intelligent face. Little did I think I should 
have the pleasure of sitting with it in after-times as an old 
friend, and seeing it careworn and still finer. Allen, the 
Grecian, was so handsome, though in another and more 
obvious way, that running one day against a barrow-woman 
in the street, and turning round to appease her in the midst 
of her abuse, she said, " Where are you driving to, you great 
hulking, good-for-nothing — beautiful fellow, God bless you ! " 
Le Grice the elder was a wag, like his brother, but more 
staid. He went into the Church, as he ought to do, and 
married a rich widow. He published a translation, abridged, 
of the celebrated pastoral of Longus; and report at school 
made him the author of a little anonymous tract on the Art 
of Poizing the Fire. 

Few of us cared for any of the books that were taught : 
and no pains were taken to make us do so. The boys had 
no helps to information, bad or good, except what the master 
afforded them respecting manufactures — a branch of know- 
ledge to which, as I before observed, he had a great tendency, 
and which was the only point on which he was enthusiastic 
and gratuitous. I do not blame him for what he taught us of 

5—2 



68 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

this kind : there was a use in it, beyond what he was aware 
of ; but it was the only one on which he volunteered any 
assistance. In this he took evident delight. I remember, in 
explaining pigs of iron or lead to us, he made a point of 
crossing one of his legs with the other, and, cherishing it up 
and down with great satisfaction, saying, " A pig, children, is 
about the thickness of my leg." Upon which, with a slavish 
pretence of novelty, we all looked at it, as if he had not told 
us so a hundred times. In everything else we had to hunt 
out our own knowledge. He would not help us with a word 
till he had ascertained that we had done all we could to learn 
the meaning of it ourselves. This discipline was useful ; and 
in this and every other respect, we had all the advantages 
which a mechanical sense of right, and a rigid exaction of 
duty, could afford us ; but no further. The only superfluous 
grace that he was guilty of, was the keeping a manuscript 
book, in which, by a rare luck, the best exercise in English 
verse was occasionally copied out for immortality ! To have 
verses in " the Book" was the rarest and highest honour 
conceivable to our imaginations. I never, alas ! attained it. 

How little did I care for any verses at that time, except 
English ones ; I had no regard even for Ovid. I read and 
knew nothing of Horace ; though I had got somehow a liking 
for his character. Cicero I disliked, as I cannot help doing 
still. Demosthenes I was inclined to admire, but did not know 
why, and would very willingly have given up him and his 
difficulties together. Homer I regarded with horror, as a 
series of lessons which I had to learn by heart before I under- 
stood him. When I had to conquer, in this way, lines which 
I had not construed, I had recourse to a sort of artificial 
memory, by which I associated the Greek words with sounds 
that had a meaning in English. Thus, a passage about Thetis 
I made to bear on some circumstance that had taken place in 
the school. An account of a battle was converted into a 
series of jokes ; and the master, while I was saying my lesson 
to him in trepidation, little suspected what a figure he was 
often cutting in the text. The only classic I remember hav- 
ing any love for was Virgil; and that was for the episode of 
Nisus and Euryalus. 

But there were three books which I read in whenever I 
could, and which often got me into trouble. These were 
Tooke's Pantheon, Lempriere's Classical Dictionary, and 
Spence's Polymetis, the great folio edition with plates. Tooke 



SCHOOL-DAYS. GO 

was a prodigious favourite with us. I see before me, as 
vividly now as ever, his Mars and Apollo, his Venus and 
Aurora, which I was continually trying to copy ; the Mars, 
coming on furiously in his car; Apollo, with his radiant head, 
in the midst of shades and fountains; Aurora with hers, a 
golden dawn ; and Venus, very handsome, w r e thought, and 
not looking too modest in " a slight cyrnar." It is curious 
how completely the graces of the Pagan theology overcame 
with us the -wise cautions and reproofs that were set against 
it in the pages of Mr. Tooke. Some years after my de- 
parture from school, happening to look at the work in ques- 
tion, I was surprised to find so much of that matter in him. 
When I came to reflect, I had a sort of recollection that we 
used occasionally to notice it, as something inconsistent with 
the rest of the text — strange, and odd, and like the inter- 
ference of some pedantic old gentleman. This, indeed, is 
pretty nearly the case. The author has also made a strange 
mistake about Bacchus, whom he represents, both in his text 
and his print, as a mere belly-god ; a corpulent child, like the 
Bacchus bestriding a tun. This is anything but classical. 
The truth is, it was a sort of pious fraud, like many other 
things palmed upon antiquity. Tooke's Pantheon was written 
originally in Latin by the Jesuits. 

Our Lempriere was a fund of entertainment. Spence's 
Poli/metis was not so easily got at. There was also some- 
thing in the text that did not invite us ; but we admired the 
fine large prints. However, Tooke was the favourite. I can- 
not divest myself of a notion, to this day, that there is some- 
thing really clever in the picture of Apollo. The Minerva w r e 
" could not abide; " Juno was no favourite, for all her throne 
and her peacock; and we thought Diana too pretty. The 
instinct against these three goddesses begins early. I used to 
wonder how Juno and Minerva could have the insolence to 
dispute the apple with Venus. 

In those times, Cooke's edition of the British poets came up. 
I had got an odd volume of Spenser; and I fell passionately 
in love with Collins and Gray. How I loved those little six- 
penny numbers containing whole poets ! I doted on their 
size; I doted on their type, on their ornaments, on their 
wrappers containing lists of other poets, and on the engravings 
from Kirk. I bought them over and over again, and used to 
get up select sets, which disappeared like buttered crumpets ; 
for I could resist neither giving them away, nor possessing 



70 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUKT. 

them. When the master tormented me — when I used to hate 
and loathe the sight of Homer, and Demosthenes, and Cicero — 
I would comfort myself with thinking of the sixpence in my 
pocket, with which I should go out to Paternoster Row, when 
school was over, and buy another number of an English poet. 

I was already fond of writing verses. The first I remem- 
ber were in honour of the Duke of York's " Victory at Dun- 
kirk ; " which victory, to my great mortification, turned out 
to be a defeat. I compared him with Achilles and Alexander; 
or should rather say, trampled upon those heroes in the com- 
parison. I fancied him riding through the field, and shooting 
right and left of him ! Afterwards, when in Great Erasmus, 
I wrote a poem called Winter, in consequence of reading 
Thomson ; and when Deputy Grecian, I completed some hun- 
dred stanzas of another, called the Fairy King, which was to 
be in emulation of Spenser ! I also wrote a long poem in 
irregular Latin verses (such as they were) entitled Thor ; the 
consequence of reading Gray's Odes and Mallett's Northern 
Antiquities. English verses were the only exercise I per- 
formed with satisfaction. Themes, or prose essays, I wrote so 
badly, that the master was in the habit of contemptuously 
crumpling them up in his hand, and calling out, " Here, 
children, there is something to amuse you ! " Upon which 
the servile part of the boys would jump up, seize the paper, 
and be amused accordingly. 

The essays must have been very absurd, no doubt ; but 
those who would have tasted the ridicule best were the last 
to move. There was an absurdity in giving us such essays 
to write. They were upon a given subject, generally a moral 
one, such as Ambition or the Love of Money : and the regular 
process in the manufacture was this : — You wrote out the sub- 
ject very fairly at top, Quid non mortalia, &c, or, Crescit amor 
nummi. Then the ingenious thing was to repeat this 
apophthegm in as many words and roundabout phrases as 
possible, which took up a good bit of the paper. Then you 
attempted to give a reason or two, why amor nummi was bad ; 
or on what accounts heroes ought to eschew ambition; after 
which naturally came a few examples, got out of Plutarch or 
the Selector e Profanis ; and the happy moralist concluded 
with signing his name. Somebody speaks of schoolboys going 
about to one another on these occasions, and asking for " a 
little sense." That was not the phrase with us; it was " a 
thought." " P , can you give me a thought ? " " C , 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 71 

for God's sake, help me to a thought, for it only wants ten 

minutes to eleven." It was a joke with P , who knew 

my hatred of themes, and how I used to hurry over them, to 
come to me at a quarter to eleven, and say, " Hunt, have you 

begun your theme ? " — " Yes, P ." He then, when the 

quarter of an hour had expired, and the bell tolled, came 
again, and, with a sort of rhyming formula to the other 
question, said, " Hunt, have you done your theme ? " — 
« Yes, P ." 

How I dared to trespass in this way upon the patience of 
the master, I cannot conceive. I suspect that the themes 
appeared to him more absurd than careless. Perhaps another 
thing perplexed him. The master was rigidly orthodox ; the 
school establishment also was orthodox and high Tory ; and 
there was just then a little perplexity, arising from the free 
doctrines inculcated by the books we learned, and the new 
and alarming echo of them struck on the ears of power by the 
French Eevolution. My father was in the habit of express- 
ing his opinions. He did not conceal the new tendency which 
he felt to modify those which he entertained respecting both 
Church and State. His unconscious son at school, nothing 
doubting or suspecting, repeated his eulogies of Timoleon and 
the Gracchi, with all a schoolboy's enthusiasm ; and the 
master's mind was not of a pitch to be superior to this un- 
witting annoyance. It was on these occasions, I suspect, that 
he crumpled up my themes with a double contempt, and with 
an equal degree of perplexity. 

There was a better school exercise, consisting of an abridg- 
ment of some paper in the Spectator. We made, however, 
little of it, and thought it very difficult and perplexing. In 
fact, it was a hard task for boys, utterly unacquainted with the 
world, to seize the best points out of the writings of masters 
in experience. It only gave the Spectator an unnatural 
gravity in our eyes. A common paper for selection, because 
reckoned one of the easiest, was the one beginning, " I have 
always preferred cheerfulness to mirth." I had heard this 
paper so often, and was so tired with it, that it gave me a 
great inclination to prefer mirth to cheerfulness. 

My books were a never-ceasing consolation to me, and 
such they have ever continued. My favourites, out of school 
hours, were Spenser, Collins, Gray, and the Arabian Nights. 
Pope I admired more than loved; Milton was above me ; and 
the only play of Shakspeare's with which I was conversant 



72 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HU2TT. 

was Hamlet, of which I had a delighted awe. Neither then, 
however, nor at any time, have I been as fond of dramatic 
reading as of any other, though I have written many dramas 
myself, and have even a special propensity for so doing ; a 
contradiction for which I have never been able to account. 
Chaucer, who has since been one of my best friends, I was 
not acquainted with at school, nor till long afterwards. 
Hudibras I remember reading through at one desperate 
plunge, while I lay incapable of moving, with two scalded 
legs. I did it as a sort of achievement, driving on through 
the verses without understanding a twentieth part of them, 
but now and then laughing immoderately at the rhymes and 
similes, and catching a bit of knowledge unawares. I had a 
schoolfellow of the name of Brooke, afterwards an officer in 
the East India Service — a grave, quiet boy, with a fund of 
manliness and good-humour. He would pick out the ludi- 
crous couplets, like plums ; such as those on the astrologer, — 
" Who deals in destiny's dark counsels, 
And sage opinions of the moon sells;" 

And on the apothecary's shop — 

" With stores of deleterious med'cines, 
Which whosoever took is dead since." 

He had the little thick duodecimo edition, with Hogarth/s 
plates — dirty, and well read, looking like Hudibras himself. 

I read through, at the same time, and with little less sense 
of it as a task, Milton's Paradise Lost. The divinity of it 
was so much " Heathen Greek " to us. Unluckily, I could 
not taste the beautiful " Heathen Greek" of the style. Mil- 
ton's heaven made no impression ; nor could I enter even into 
the earthly catastrophe of his man and woman. The only two 
things I thought of were their happiness in Paradise, where 
(to me) they eternally remained ; and the strange malignity 
of the devil, who, instead of getting them out of it, as the 
poet represents, only served to bind them closer. He seemed 
an odd shade to the picture. The figure he cut in the 
engravings was more in my thoughts than anything said of 
him in the poem. He was a sort of human wild beast, lurk- 
ing about the garden in which they lived; though, in conse- 
quence of the dress given him in some of the plates, this man 
with a tail occasionally confused himself in my imagination 
with a Roman general. I could make little of it. I believe, 
the plates impressed me altogether much more than the 
poem. Perhaps they were the reason why I thought of Adam 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 73 

and Eve as I did ; the pictures of them in their paradisaical 
state being more numerous than those in which they appear 
exiled. Besides, in their exile they were together ; and 
this constituting the best thing in their paradise, I suppose 
I could not so easily get miserable with them when out of it. 
I had the same impression from Dr. Johnson's Rasselas. I 
never thought of anything in it but the Happy Valley. I 
might have called to mind, with an effort, a shadowy some- 
thing about disappointment, and a long remainder of talk 
which I would not read again, perhaps never thoroughly did 
read. The Happy Valley was new to me, and delightful, and 
everlasting ; and there the princely inmates were everlastingly 
to be found. 

The scald that I speak of as confining me to bed was a bad 
one. I will give an account of it, because it furthers the 
elucidation of our school manners. I had then become a 
monitor, or one of the chiefs of a ward ; and I was sitting 
before the fire one evening, after the boys had gone to bed, 
wrapped up in the perusal of the Wonderful Magazine, and 
having in my ear at the same time the bubbling of a great 
pot, or rather cauldron of water, containing what was by 
courtesy called a bread pudding ; being neither more nor less 
than a loaf or two of our bread, which, with a little sugar 
mashed up with it, was to serve for my supper. And there 
were eyes, not yet asleep, which would look at it out of their 
beds, and regard it as a lordly dish. From this dream of 
bliss I was roused up on the sudden by a great cry, and a 
horrible agony in my legs. A u bo}^" as a fag was called, 
wishing to get something from the other side of the fireplace, 
and not choosing either to go round behind the table, or to 
disturb the illustrious legs of the monitor, had endeavoured to 
get under them or between them, and so pulled the great 
handle of the pot after him. It was a frightful sensation. 
The whole of my being seemed collected in one fiery torment 
into my legs. Wood, the Grecian (afterwards Fellow of Pem- 
broke, at Cambridge), who was in our ward, and who was 
always very kind to me (led, I believe, by my inclination for 
verses, in which he had a great name), came out of his study, 
and after helping me off with my stockings, which was a 
horrid operation, the stockings being very coarse, took me in 
his arms to the sick ward. I shall never forget the enchant- 
ing relief occasioned by the cold air, as it blew across the 
square of the sick ward. I lay there for several weeks, not 



74 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUKT- 

allowed to move for some time; and caustics became neces- 
sary before I got well. The getting well was delicious. I 
bad no tasks — no master ; plenty of books to read ; and the 
nurse's daughter (absit calumnia) brought me tea and buttered 
toast, and encouraged me to play the flute. My playing con- 
sisted of a few tunes by rote ; my fellow-invalids (none of 
them in very desperate case) would have it rather than no 
playing at all ; so we used to play and tell stories, and go to 
sleep, thinking of the blessed sick holiday we should have 
to-morrow, and of the bowl of milk and bread for breakfast, 
which was alone worth being sick for. The sight of Mr. Long's 
probe was not so pleasant. We preferred seeing it in the 
hands of Mr. Vincent, whose manners, quiet and mild, had 
double effect on a set of boys more or less jealous of the 
mixed humbleness and importance of their school. This 
was most likely the same gentleman of the name of Vincent, 
who afterwards became distinguished in his profession. He 
was dark, like a West Indian, and I used to think him 
handsome. Perhaps the nurse's daughter taught me to think 
so, for she was a considerable observer. 



CHAPTEE IV. 

SCHOOL-DAYS {continued). 



I am grateful to Christ Hospital for having bred me up in old 
cloisters, for its making me acquainted with the languages of 
Homer and Ovid, and for its having secured to me, on the 
whole, a well-trained and cheerful boyhood. It pressed no 
superstition upon me. It did not hinder my growing mind 
from making what excursions it pleased into the wide and 
healthy regions of general literature. I might buy as much 
Collins and Gray as I pleased, and get novels to my heart's 
content from the circulating libraries. There was nothing 
prohibited but what would have been prohibited by all good 
fathers ; and everything was encouraged which would have 
been encouraged by the Steeles, and Addisons, and Popes ; 
by the Warburtons, and Atterburys, and Hoadleys. Boyer 
was a severe, nay, a cruel master ; but age and reflection have 
made me sensible that I ought always to add my testimony to 
his being a laborious and a conscientious one. When his 
severity went beyond the mark, I believe he was always sorry 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 75 

for it : sometimes I am sure he was. He once (though the 
anecdote at first sight may look like a burlesque on the re- 
mark) knocked out one of my teeth with the back of a 
Homer, in a fit of impatience at my stammering. The tooth 
was a loose one, and I told him as much ; but the blood 
rushed out as I spoke : he turned pale, and, on my proposing 
to go out and wash the mouth, he said, " Go, child," in a tone 
of voice amounting to the paternal. Now " Go, child," from 
Boyer, was worth a dozen tender speeches from any one else ; 
and it was felt that I had got an advantage over him, acknow- 
ledged by himself. 

If I had reaped no other benefit from Christ Hospital, the 
school would be ever dear to me from the recollection of the 
friendships I formed in it, and of the first heavenly taste it 
gave me of that most spiritual of the affections. I use the 
word " heavenly " advisedly ; and I call friendship the most 
spiritual of the affections, because even one's kindred, in par- 
taking of our flesh and blood, become, in a manner, mixed 
up with our entire being. Not that I would disparage any 
other form of affection, worshipping, as I do, all forms of it, 
love in particular, which, in its highest state, is friendship and 
something more. But if ever I tasted a disembodied trans- 
port on earth, it was in those friendships which I entertained 
at school, before I dreamt of any maturer feeling. I shall 
never forget the impression it first made on me. I loved my 
friend for his gentleness, his candour, his truth, his good 
repute, his freedom even from my own livelier manner, his 
calm and reasonable kindness. It was not any particular 
talent that attracted me to him, or anything striking whatso- 
ever. I should say, in one word, it was his goodness. I 
doubt whether he eyer had a conception of a tithe of the 
regard and respect I entertained for him ; and I smile to think 
of the perplexity (though he never showed it) which he pro- 
bably felt sometimes at my enthusiastic expressions ; for I 
thought him a kind of angel. It is no exaggeration to say, 
that, take away the unspiritual part of it — the genius and the 
knowledge — and there is no height of conceit indulged in by 
the most romantic character in Shakspeare, which surpassed 
what I felt towards the merits I ascribed to him, and the 
delight which I took in his society. With the other boys I 
played antics, and rioted in fantastic jests ; but in his society, 
or whenever I thought of him, I fell into a kind of Sabbath 
state of bliss ; and I am sure I could have died for him. 



76 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

I experienced this delightful affection towards three succes- 
sive schoolfellows, till two of them had for some time gone out 
into the world and forgotten me ; but it grew less with each, 
and in more than one instance became rivalled by a new set 
of emotions, especially in regard to the last, for I fell in love 
with his sister — at least, I thought so. But on the occurrence 
of her death, not long after, I was startled at finding myself 
assume an air of greater sorrow than I felt, and at being 
willing to be relieved by the sight of the first pretty face that 
turned towards me. I was in the situation of the page in 
Figaro ;— 

" Ogni donna cangiar di colore; 
Ogni donna mi fa palpitar." 

My friend, who died himself not long after his quitting the 
University, was of a German family in the service of the 
court, very refined and musical. I likened them to the people 
in the novels of Augustus La Fontaine ; and with the younger 
of the two sisters I had a great desire to play the part of the 
hero in the Family of Halden. 

The elder, who was my senior, and of manners too advanced 
for me to aspire to, became distinguished in private circles as 
an accomplished musician. How I used to rejoice when they 
struck their " harps in praise of Bragela !" and how ill-bred I 
must have appeared when I stopped beyond all reasonable time 
of visiting, unable to tear myself away ! They lived in Spring 
Gardens, in a house which I have often gone out of my way 
to look at ; and as I first heard of Mozart in their company, 
and first heard his marches in the Park, I used to associate 
with their idea whatsoever was charming and graceful. 

Maternal notions of war came to nothing before love and 
music, and the steps of the officers on parade. The young 
ensign with his flag, and the ladies with their admiration of 
him, carried everything before them. 

I had already borne to school the air of " Non piu andrai-" 
and, with the help of instruments made of paper, into which 
we breathed what imitations we could of hautboys and cla- 
rionets, had inducted the boys into the " pride, pomp, and 
circumstance" of that glorious bit of war. 

Thus is war clothed and recommended to all of us, and not 
without reason, as long as it is a necessity, or as long as it is 
something, at least, which we have not acquired knowledge or 
means enough to do away with. A bullet is of all pills the 
one that most requires gilding. 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 77 

But I will not bring these night-thoughts into the morning 
of life. Besides, I am anticipating ; for this was not my first 
love. I shall mention that presently. 

I have not done with my school reminiscences ; but in 
order to keep a straightforward course, and notice simultaneous 
events in their proper places, I shall here speak of the persons 
and things in which I took the greatest interest when I was 
not within school-bounds. 

The two principal houses at which I visited, till the arrival 
of our relations from the West Indies, were Mr. West's (late 
President of the Royal Academy), in Newman-street, and 
Mr. Godfrey Thornton's (of the distinguished City family), in 
Austin Friars. How I loved the Graces in one, and every- 
thing in the other ! Mr. West (who, as I have already men- 
tioned, had married one of my relations) had bought his 
house, I believe, not long after he came to England ; and he 
had added a gallery at the back of it, terminating in a couple 
of lofty rooms. The gallery was a continuation of the house- 
passage, and, together with one of those rooms and the parlour, 
formed three sides of a garden, very small but elegant, with a 
grass-plot in the middle, and busts upon stands under an 
arcade. The gallery, as you went up it, formed an angle at a 
little distance to the left, then another to the right, and then 
took a longer stretch into the two rooms ; and it was hung 
with the artist's sketches all the way. In a corner between 
the two angles was a study-door, with casts of Venus and 
Apollo on each side of it. The two rooms contained the 
largest of his pictures ; and in the farther one, after stepping 
softly down the gallery, as if reverencing the dumb life on the 
walls, you generally found the mild and quiet artist at his 
work ; happy, for he thought himself immortal. 

I need not enter into the merits of an artist who is so well 
known, and has been so often criticized. He was a man with 
regular, mild features ; and, though of Quaker origin, had 
the look of what he was, a painter to a court. His appear- 
ance was so gentlemanly, that, the moment he changed his 
gown for a coat, he seemed to be full-dressed. The simplicity 
and self-possession of the young Quaker, not having time 
enough to grow stiff (for he went early to study at Rome), 
took up, I suppose, with more ease than most Avould have 
done, the urbanities of his new position. And what simpli- 
city helped him to, favour would retain. Yet this man, so 
well bred, and so indisputably clever in his art (whatever 



78 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

might be the amount of his genius), had received so careless, 
or so homely an education when a boy, that he could hardly 
read. He pronounced also some of his words, in reading, 
with a puritanical barbarism, such as haive for have, as some 
people pronounce when they sing psalms. But this was, per- 
haps, an American custom. My mother, who both read and 
spoke remarkably well, would say haive and shaul (for shall), 
when she sang her hymns. But it was not so well in reading 
lectures to the Academy. Mr. West would talk of his art all 
day long, painting all the while. On other subjects he was 
not so fluent ; and on political and religious matters he tried 
hard to maintain the reserve common with those about a court. 
He succeeded ill in both. There were always strong suspi- 
cions of his leaning to his native side in politics ; and during 
Bonaparte's triumph, he could not contain his enthusiasm for 
the' Eepublican chief, going even to Paris to pay him his 
homage, when First Consul. The admiration of high colours 
and powerful effects, natural to a painter, was too strong for 
him. How he managed this matter with the higher powers 
in England I cannot say. Probably he was the less heedful, 
inasmuch as he was not very carefully paid. I believe he did 
a great deal for George the Third with little profit. Mr. West 
certainly kept his love for Bonaparte no secret ; and it was no 
wonder, for the latter expressed admiration of his pictures. 
The artist thought the conqueror's smile enchanting, and that 
he had the handsomest leg he had ever seen. He was present 
when the " Venus de' Medici " was talked of, the French 
having just taken possession of her. Bonaparte, Mr. West 
said, turned round to those about him, and said, with his eyes 
lit up, " She's coming !" as if he had been talking of a living 
person. I believe he retained for the Emperor the love that 
he had had for the First Consul, a wedded love, "for better, 
for worse." However, I believe also that he retained it after 
the Emperor's downfall — which is not what every painter did. 
But I am getting out of my chronology. The quiet of 
Mr. West's gallery, the tranquil, intent beauty of the statues, 
and the subjects of some of the pictures, particularly Death 
on the Pale Horse, the Deluge, the Scotch King hunting the 
Stag, Moses on Mount Sinai, Christ Healing the Sick (a 
sketch), Sir Philip Sidney giving up the Water to the Dying 
Soldier, the Installation of the Knights of the Garter, and 
Ophelia before the King and Queen (one of the best things 
he ever did), made a great impression upon me. My mother 






SCHOOL-DAYS. 79 

and I used to go down the gallery, as if we were treading 
on wool. She was in the habit of stopping to look at some 
of the pictures, particularly the Deluge and the Ophelia, with 
a countenance quite awe-stricken. She used also to point out 
to me the subjects relating to liberty and patriotism, and the 
domestic affections. Agrippina bringing home the ashes of 
Germanicus was a great favourite with her. I remember, too, 
the awful delight afforded us by the Angel slaying the Army 
of Sennacherib ; a bright figure lording it in the air, with a 
chaos of human beings below. 

As Mr. "West was almost sure to be found at work, in the 
farthest room, habited in his white woollen gown, so you 
might have predicated, with equal certainty, that Mrs. West 
was sitting in the parlour, reading. I used to think, that if I 
had such a parlour to sit in, I should do just as she did. It 
was a good-sized room, with two windows looking out on the 
little garden I spoke of, and opening to it from one of them 
by a flight of steps. The garden, with its busts in it, 
and the pictures which you knew were on the other side of 
its wall, had an Italian look. The room was hung with 
engravings and coloured prints. Among them was the Lion 
Hunt, from Rubens ; the Hierarchy with the Godhead, from 
Raphael, which I hardly thought it right to look at ; and 
two screens by the fireside, containing prints (from Angelica 
Kauffman, I think, but I am not sure that Mr. West himself 
was not the designer) of the Loves of Angelica and Medoro, 
which I could have looked at from morning to night. An- 
gelica's intent eyes, I thought, had the best of it ; but I 
thought so without knowing why. This gave me a love for 
Ariosto before I knew him. I got Hoole's translation, but 
could make nothing of it. Angelica Kauffman seemed to me 
to have done much more for her namesake. She could see 
farther into a pair of eyes than Mr. Hoole with his spectacles. 
This reminds me that I could make as little of Pope's Homer, 
which a schoolfellow of mine was always reading, and which 
I was ashamed of not being able to like. It was not that 
I did not admire Pope ; but the words in his translation 
always took precedence in my mind of the things, and the 
unvarying sweetness of his versification tired me before I 
knew the reason. This did not hinder me afterwards from 
trying to imitate it ; nor from succeeding ; that is to say, as 
far as everybody else succeeds, and writing smooth verses. 
It is Pope's wit and closeness that are the difficult things, and 



80 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

that make him what he is : a truism which the mistakes of 
critics on divers sides have rendered it but too warrantable 
to repeat. 

Mrs. West and my mother used to talk of old times, and 
Philadelphia, and my father's prospects at court. I sat apart 
with a book, from which I stole glances at Angelica. I had , 
a habit at that time of holding my breath, which forced me 
every now and then to take long sighs. My aunt would 
offer me a bribe not to sigh. I would earn it once or twice ; 
but the sighs were sure to return. These wagers I did not 
care for ; but I remember being greatly mortified when Mr. 
West offered me half-a-crown if I would solve the old question 
of " Who was the father of Zebedee's children?" and I could 
not tell him. He never made his appearance till dinner, and 
returned to his painting-room directly after it. And so at 
tea-time. The talk was very quiet ; the neighbourhood quiet ; 
the servants quiet; I thought the very squirrel in the cage 
would have made a greater noise anywhere else. James, the 
porter, a fine tall fellow, who figured in his master's pictures 
as an apostle, was as quiet as he was strong. Standing for his 
picture had become a sort of religion with him. Even the 
butler, with his little twinkling eyes, full of pleasant conceit, 
vented his notions of himself in half-tones and whispers. This 
was a strange fantastic person. He got my brother Eobert 
to take a likeness of him, small enough to be contained in a 
shirt-pin. It was thought that his twinkling eyes, albeit not 
young, had some fair cynosure in the neighbourhood. What 
was my brother's amazement, when, the next time he saw 
him, the butler said, with a face of enchanted satisfaction, 
" Well, sir, you see!" making a movement at the same time 
with the frill at his waistcoat. The miniature that was to be 
given to the object of his affections, had been given accordingly. 
It was in his own bosom ! 

But, notwithstanding my delight with the house at the West 
End of the town, it was not to compare with my beloved one 
in the City. There was quiet in the one ; there were beau- 
tiful statues and pictures; and there was my Angelica for me, 
with her intent eyes, at the fireside. But, besides quiet in 
the other, there was cordiality, and there was music, and 
a family brimful of hospitality and good-nature, and dear 

Almeria (now Mrs. P e), who in vain pretends that she 

has become aged, which is what she never did, shall, would, 
might, should, or could do. Those were indeed holidays, on 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 81 

which I used to go to Austin Friars. The house (such, at 
least, are my boyish recollections) was of the description I 
have been ever fondest of, — large, rambling, old-fashioned, 
solidly built, resembling the mansions about Highgate and 
other old villages. 

It was furnished as became the house of a rich merchant 
and a sensible man, the comfort predominating over the cost- 
liness. At the back was a garden with a lawn ; and a private 
door opened into another garden, belonging to the Company 
of Drapers ; so that, what with the secluded nature of the 
street itself, and these verdant places behind it, it was truly 
nis in urbe, and a retreat. When I turned down the arch- 
way, I held my mother's hand tighter with pleasure, and was 
full of expectation, and joy, and respect. My first delight 
was in mounting the staircase to the rooms of the young 
ladies, setting my eyes on the comely and bright countenance 
of my fair friend, with her romantic name, and turning over 
for the hundredth time the books in her library. What she 
did with the volumes of the Turkish Spy, what they meant, 
or what amusement she could extract from them, was an 
eternal mystification to me. Not long ago, meeting with a 
copy of the book accidentally, I pounced upon my old 
acquaintance, and fomid him to contain better and more 
amusing stuff than people would suspect from his dry look 
and his obsolete politics.* 

The face of tenderness and respect with which Almeria 
used to welcome my mother, springing forward with her fine 
buxom figure to supply the strength which the other wanted, 
and showing what an equality of love there may be between 
youth and middle age, and rich and poor, I should never cease 
to love her for, had she not been, as she was, one of the best- 
natured persons in the world in everything. I have not seen 
her now for a great many years ; but, with that same face, 
whatever change she may pretend to find in it, she will go to 
heaven ; for it is the face of her spirit. A good heart never 
grows old. 

Of George T , her brother, who will pardon this 

omission of his worldly titles, whatever they may be, I have 

* The Turkish Spy is a sort of philosophical newspaper, in volumes; 
and, under a mask of bigotry, speculates very freely on all subjects. 
It is said to have been written by an Italian Jesuit of the name of 
Marana. The first volume has been attributed, however, to Sir 
Ivoger Manley, father of the author of the Atalantis ; and the rest to 
Dr. Midgeley, a friend of his. 

6 



82 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

a similar kind of recollection, in its proportion; for, though 
we knew him thoroughly, we saw him less. The sight of his 
face was an additional sunshine to my holiday. He was very 
generous and handsome-minded; a genuine human being. 

Mrs. T , the mother, a very lady-like woman, in a 

delicate state of health, we usually found reclining on a sofa, 
always ailing, but always with a smile for us. The father, 
a man of a large habit of body, panting with asthma, whom 
we seldom saw but at dinner, treated us with all the family 
delicacy, and would have me come and sit next him, which 
I did with a mixture of joy and dread; for it was painful to 
hear him breathe. I dwell the more upon these attentions, 
because the school that I was in held a sort of equivocal rank 
in point of what is called respectability; and it was no less 
an honour to another, than to ourselves, to know when to 
place us upon a liberal footing. Young as I was, I felt this 
point strongly ; and was touched with as grateful a tenderness 
towards those who treated me handsomely, as I retreated 
inwardly upon a proud consciousness of my Greek and Latin, 
when the supercilious would have humbled me. Blessed 
house ! May a blessing be upon your rooms, and your lawn, 
and your neighbouring garden, and the quiet old monastic 
name of your street ! and may it never be a thoroughfare ! 
and may all your inmates be happy ! Would to God one 
could renew, at a moment's notice, the happy hours we have 
enjoyed in past times, w T ith the same circles, and in the same 
houses ! A planet with such a privilege would be a great 
lift nearer heaven. What prodigious evenings, reader, we 
would have of it ! What fine pieces of childhood, of youth, 
of manhood — ay, and of age, as long as our friends lasted ! 

The old gentleman in Gil Bias, who complained that the 
peaches were not so fine as they used to be when he was 
young, had more reason than appears on the face of it. He 
missed not only his former palate, but the places he ate them 
in, and those who ate them with him. I have been told, that 
the cranberries I have met with since must have been as fine 

as those I got with the T 's ; as large and as juicy ; and 

that they came from the same place. For all that, I never 
ate a cranberry-tart since I dined in Austin Friars. 

I should have fallen in love with A. T , had I been old 

enough. As it was, my first flame, or my first notion of a 
flame, which is the same thing in those days, was for my 
giddy cousin Fanny Dayrell, a charming West Indian. Her 






SCHOOL-DAYS. 83 

mother, the aunt I spoke of, had just come from Barbados 
with her two daughters and a sister. She was a woman of a 
princely spirit ; and having a good property, and every wish 
to make her relations more comfortable, she did so. It 
became holiday with us all. My mother raised her head ; 
my father grew young again ; my cousin Kate (Christiana 
rather, for her name was not Catherine; Christiana Arabella 
was her name) conceived a regard for one of my brothers, 
and married him ; and for my part, besides my pictures and 
Italian garden at Mr. West's, and my beloved old English 
house in Austin Friars, I had now another paradise in Great 
Ormond Street. 

My aunt had something of the West Indian pride, but all 
in a good spirit, and was a mighty cultivator of the gentilities, 
inward as well as outward. I did not dare to appear before 
her with dirty hands, she would have rebuked me so hand- 
somely. For some reason or other, the marriage of my 
brother and his cousin was kept secret a little while. I be- 
came acquainted with it by chance, coming in upon a holiday, 
the day the ceremony took place. Instead of keeping me out 
of the secret by a trick, they very wisely resolved upon trusting 
me with it, and relying upon my honour. My honour happened 
to be put to the test, and I came off with flying colours. It 
is to this circumstance I trace the religious idea I have ever 
since entertained of keeping a secret. I went with the bride 
and bridegroom to church, and remember kneeling apart and 
weeping bitterly. My tears were unaccountable to me then. 
Doubtless they were owing to an instinctive sense of the great 
change that was taking place in the lives of two human 
beings, and of the unalterableness of the engagement. Death 
and Life seem to come together on these occasions, like awful 
guests at a feast, and look one another in the face. 

It was not with such good effect that my aunt raised my 
notions of a schoolboy's pocket-money to half-crowns, and 
crowns, and half-guineas. My father and mother were both 
as generous as daylight ; but they could not give what they 
had not. I had been unused to spending, and accordingly I 
spent with a vengeance. I remember a ludicrous instance. 
The first half-guinea that I received brought about me a con- 
sultation of companions to know how to get rid of it. One 
shilling was devoted to pears, another to apples, another to 
cakes, and so on, all to be bought immediately, as they were ; 
till coming to the sixpence, and being struck with a recollec- 

6—2 



84 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

tion that I ought to do something useful with that, I bought 
sixpenn'rth of shoe-strings: these, no doubt, vanished like 
the rest. The next half-guinea came to the knowledge of the 
master : he interfered, which was one of his proper actions ; 
and my aunt practised more self-denial in future.' 

Our new family from abroad were true West Indians, or, 
as they would have phrased it, " true Barbadians born." 
They were generous, warm-tempered, had great good-nature ; 
were proud, but not unpleasantly so; lively, yet indolent; 
temperately epicurean in their diet; fond of company, and 
dancing, and music; and lovers of show, but far from with- 
holding the substance. I speak chiefly of the mother and 
daughters. My other aunt, an elderly maiden, who piqued 
herself on the delicacy of her hands and ankles, and made you 
understand how many suitors she had refused (for which she 
expressed anything but repentance, being extremely vexed), 
was not deficient in complexional good-nature ; but she was 
narrow-minded, and seemed to care for nothing in the world 
but two things : first, for her elder niece Kate, whom she 
had helped to nurse ; and second, for a becoming set-out of 
coffee and buttered toast, particularly of a morning, when it 
was taken up to her in bed, with a suitable equipage of silver 
and other necessaries of life. Yes ; there was one more in- 
dispensable thing — slavery. It was frightful to hear her 
small mouth and little mincing tones assert the necessity not 
only of slaves, but of robust corporal punishment to keep 
them to their duty. But she did this, because her want of 
ideas could do no otherwise. Having had slaves, she won- 
dered how anybody could object to so natural and lady- 
like an establishment. Late in life, she took to fancying 
that every polite old gentleman was in love with her ; 
and thus she lived on, till her dying moment, in a flutter of 
expectation. 

The black servant must have puzzled this aunt of mine 
sometimes. All the wonder of which she was capable, he 
certainly must have roused, not without a " quaver of con- 
sternation." This man had come over with them from the 
West Indies. He was a slave on my aunt's estate, and as 
such he demeaned himself, till he learned that there was no 
such thing as a slave in England; that the moment a man set 
his foot on English ground he was free. I cannot help 
smiling to think of the bewildered astonishment into which 
his first overt act, in consequence of this knowledge, must 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 85 

have put my poor aunt Courtliope (for that was her Christian 
name). Most likely it broke out in the shape of some remon- 
strance about his fellow-servants. He partook of the pride 
common to all the Barbadians, black as well as white; and 
the maid-servants tormented him. I remember his coming 
up in the parlour one day, and making a ludicrous represen- 
tation of the affronts put upon his office and person, inter- 
spersing his chattering and gesticulations with explanatory 
dumb show. One of the maids was a pretty girl, who had 
manoeuvred till she got him stuck in a corner ; and he insisted 
upon telling us all that she said and did. His respect for 
himself had naturally increased since he became free ; but he 
did not know what to do with it. Poor Samuel was not un- 
generous, after his fashion. He also wished, with his freedom, 
to acquire a freeman's knowledge, but stuck fast at pothooks 
and hangers. To frame a written B he pronounced a thing 
impossible. Of his powers on the violin he made us more 
sensible, not without frequent remonstrances, which it must 
have taken all my aunt's good- nature to make her repeat. He 
had left two wives in Barbados, one of whom was brought to 
bed of a son a little after he came away. For this son he 
wanted a name, that was new, sounding, and long. They 
referred him to the reader of Homer and Virgil. With 
classical names he was well acquainted, Mars and Venus 
being among his most intimate friends, besides Jupiters and 
Adonises, and Dianas with large families. At length we 
succeeded with Neoptolemus. He said he had never heard it 
before ; and he made me "write it for him in a great text-hand, 
that there might be no mistake. 

My aunt took a country-house at Merton, in Surrey, where 
I passed three of the happiest weeks of my life. It was the 
custom at our school, in those days, to allow us only one set 
of unbroken holidays during the whole time we w r ere there — 
I mean, holidays in which we remained away from school by 
night as well as by day. The period was always in August. 
Imagine a schoolboy passionately fond of the green fields, who 
had never slept out of the heart of the City for years. It was 
a compensation even for the pang of leaving my friend ; and 
then what letters I would write to him ! And what letters I 
did write ! What full measure of affection pressed down, and 
running over ! I read, walked, had a garden and orchard 
to run in ; and fields that I could have rolled in, to have my 
will of them. 



86 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

My father accompanied me to Wimbledon to see Home 
Tooke, who patted me on the head. I felt very differently 
under his hand, and under that of the bishop of London, 
when he confirmed a crowd of us in St. Paul's. Not that I 
thought of politics, though I had a sense of his being a 
patriot ; but patriotism, as well as everything else, was con- 
nected in my mind with something classical, and Home Tooke 
held his political reputation with me by the same tenure that 
lie held his fame for learning and grammatical knowledge. 
" The learned Home Tooke" was the designation by which I 
styled him in some verses I wrote ; in which verses, by the 
way, with a poetical licence which would have been thought 
more classical by Queen Elizabeth than my master, I called 
my aunt a " nymph." In the ceremony of confirmation by 
the bishop, there was something too official and like a de- 
spatch of business, to excite my veneration. My head only 
anticipated the coming of his hand with a thriU in the scalp : 
and when it came, it tickled me. 

My cousins had the celebrated Dr. CaHcott for a music- 
master. The doctor, who was a scholar and a great reader, 
was so pleased with me one day for being able to translate the 
beginning of Xenophon's Anabasis (one of our schoolbooks), 
that he took me out with him to Nunn's the bookseller's in 
Great Queen Street, and made me a present of Schrevelius's 
Lexicon. When he came down to Merton, he let me ride his 
horse. What days were those ! Instead of being roused 
against my will by a bell, I jumped up with the lark, and 
stroHed " out of bounds." Instead of bread and water for 
breakfast, I had coffee, and tea, and buttered toast : for dinner, 
not a hunk of bread and a modicum of hard meat, or a bowl 
of pretended broth; but fish, and fowl, and noble hot joints, 
and puddings, and sweets, and Guava jellies, and other West 
Indian mysteries of peppers and preserves, and wine; and then 
I had tea; and I sat up to supper like a man, and lived so 
well, that I might have been very ill ? had I not run about all 
the rest of the day. 

My strolls about the fields with a book were full of happi-^ 
ness : only my dress used to get me stared at by the villagers. 
Walking one day by the little river Wandle, I came upon one 
of the loveliest girls I ever beheld, standing in the water with 
bare legs, washing some linen. She turned as she was stoop- 
ing, and showed a blooming oval face with blue eyes, on either 
side of which flowed a profusion of flaxen locks. With the 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 87 

exception of the colour of the hair, it was like Raphael's own 
head turned into a peasant girl's. The eyes were full of gen- 
tle astonishment at the sight of me; and mine must have 
wondered no less. However, I was prepared for such won- 
ders. It was only one of my poetical visions realized, and I 
expected to find the world full of them. "What she thought 
of my blue skirts and yellow stockings is not so clear. She 
did not, however, taunt me with my " petticoats," as the girls 
in the streets of London would do, making me blush, as I 
thought they ought to have done instead. My beauty in the 
brook was too gentle and diffident ; at least I thought so, and 
my own heart did not contradict me. I then took every 
beauty for an Arcadian, and every brook for a fairy stream ; 
and the reader would be surprised if he knew to what an 
extent I have a similar tendency still. I find the same possi- 
bilities by another path. 

I do not remember whether an Abbe Paris, who taught my 
cousins French, used to see them in the country ; but I never 
shall forget him in Ormond Street. He was an emigrant, very 
gentlemanly, with a face of remarkable benignity, and a voice 
that became it. He spoke English in a slow manner, that 
was very graceful. I shall never forget his saying one day, 
in answer to somebody who pressed him on the subject, and 
in the mildest of tones, that without doubt it was impossible 
to be saved out of the pale of the Catholic Church. 

One contrast of this sort reminds me of another. My 
aunt Courthope had something growing out on one of her 
knuckles, which she was afraid to let a surgeon look at. There 
was a Dr. Chapman, a West Indian physician, who came to 
see us, a person of great suavity of manners, with all that air 
of languor and want of energy which the West Indians often 
exhibit. He was in the habit of inquiring, with the softest 
voice in the world, how my aunt's hand was ; and coming one 
day upon us in the midst of dinner, and sighing forth his usual 
question, she gave it him over her shoulder to look at. In a 
moment she shrieked, and the swelling was gone. The meekest 
of doctors had done it away with his lancet. 

I had no drawback on my felicity at Merton, with the ex- 
ception of an occasional pang at my friend's absence, and a 
new vexation that surprised and mortified me. I had been 
accustomed at school to sleep with sixty boys in the room, 
and some old night-fears that used to haunt me were for- 
gotten. No Mantichoras there ! — no old men crawling on the 



88 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

floor ! What was my chagrin, when on sleeping alone, after 
so long a period, I found my terrors come back again ! — not, 
indeed, in all the same shapes. Beasts could frighten me no 
longer; but I was at the mercy of any other ghastly fiction 
that presented itself to my mind, crawling or ramping. I 
struggled hard to say nothing about it; but my days began 
to be discoloured with fears of my nights ; and with unutter- 
able humiliation I begged that the footman might be allowed 
to sleep in the same room. Luckily, my request was attended 
to in the kindest and most reconciling manner. I was pitied 
for my fears, but praised for my candour — a balance of qua- 
lities which, I have reason to believe, did me a service far 
beyond that of the moment. Samuel, who, fortunately for 
my shame, had a great respect for fear of this kind, had his 
bed removed accordingly into my room. He used to enter- 
tain me at night with stories of Barbados and the negroes ; 
and in a few days I was reassured and happy. 

It was then (oh, shame that I must speak of fair lady after 
confessing a heart so faint !) — it was then that I fell in love 
with my cousin Fan. However, I would have fought all her 
young acquaintances round for her, timid as I was, and little 
inclined to pugnacity. 

Fanny was a lass of fifteen, with little laughing eyes, and a 
mouth like a plum. I was then (I feel as if I ought to be 
ashamed to say it) not more than thirteen, if so old ; but I 
had read Tooke's Pantheon, and came of a precocious race. 
My cousin came of one too, and was about to be married 
to a handsome young fellow of three-and-twenty. I thought 
nothing of this, for nothing could be more innocent than my 
intentions. I was not old enough, or grudging enough, or 
whatever it was, even to be jealous. I thought everybody 
must love Fanny Dayrell ; and if she did not leave me out in 
permitting it, I was satisfied. It was enough for me to be 
with her as long as I could; to gaze on her with delight as 
she floated hither and thither ; and to sit on the stiles in the 
neighbouring fields, thinking of Tooke's Pantheon. My friend- 
ship was greater than my love. Had my favourite school- 
fellow been ill, or otherwise demanded my return, I should 
certainly have chosen his society in preference. Three-fourths 
of my heart were devoted to friendship ; the rest was in a 
vague dream of "beauty, and female cousins, and nymphs, and 
green fields, and a Leling whichj though of a warm nature, 
was full of fear and respect. 



CHILDHOOD. 89 

Had the jade put me on the least equality of footing as to 
age, I know not what change might have been wrought in me ; 
but though too young herself for the serious duties she was 
about to bring on her, and full of sufficient levity and gaiety 
not to be uninterested with the little black-eyed schoolboy that 
lingered about her, my vanity was well paid off by hers, for 
she kept me at a distance by calling me petit garqon. This 
was no better than the assumption of an elder sister in her 
teens over a younger one ; but the latter feels it, nevertheless ; 
and I persuaded myself that it was particularly cruel. I 
wished the Abbe Paris at Jamaica with his French. There 
would she come in her frock and tucker (for she had not yet 
left off either), her curls dancing, and her hands clasped 
together in the enthusiasm of something to tell me, and when 
I flew to meet her, forgetting the difference of ages, and alive 
only to my charming cousin, she would repress me with a 
little fillip on the cheek, and say, " Well, petit garqon, what do 
you think of that ? " The worst of it was, that this odious 
French phrase sat insufferably well upon her plump little 
mouth. She and I used to gather peaches before the house 
were up. I held the ladder for her ; she mounted like a fairy ; 
and when I stood doting on her as she looked down and 
threw the fruit in my lap, she would cry, " Petit garqon, 
you will let 'em all drop ! " On my return to school, she gave 
me a locket for a keepsake, in the shape of a heart ; which 
was the worst thing she ever did to the petit garqon, for it 
touched me on my weak side, and looked like a sentiment. 
I believe I should have had serious thoughts of becoming 
melancholy, had I not, in returning to school, returned to 
my friend, and so found means to occupy my craving for 
sympathy. However, I wore the heart a long while. I have 
sometimes thought there was more in her French than I 
imagined ; but I believe not. She naturally took herself for 
double my age, with a lover of three-and-twenty. Soon 
after her marriage, fortune separated us for many years. My , 
passion had almost as soon died away ; but I have loved the 
name of Fanny ever since ; and when I met her again, which 
was under circumstances of trouble on her part, I could not 
see her without such an emotion as I was fain to confess 
to a person "near and dear," who forgave me for it; which 
made me love the forgiver the more. Yes! the "black ox" 
trod on the fairy foot of my light-hearted cousin Fan; of 
her, whom I could no more have thought of in conjunction 



90 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

with sorrow, than of a ball-room with a tragedy. To know 
that she was rich and admired, and abounding in mirth and 
music, was to me the same thing as to know that she 
existed. How often did I afterwards wish myself rich in 
turn, that I might have restored to her all the graces of life ! 
She was generous, and would not have denied me the satis- 
faction. 

This was my first love. That for a friend's sister was my 
second, and not so strong ; for it was divided with the admi- 
ration of which I have spoken for the Park music and " the 
soldiers." Nor had the old tendency to mix up the clerical 
with the military service been forgotten. Indeed, I have 
never been without a clerical tendency; nor, after what I 
have written for the genial edification of my fellow-creatures, 
and the extension of charitable and happy thoughts in matters 
of religion, would I be thought to speak of it without even a 
certain gravity, not compromised or turned into levity, in my 
opinion, by any cheerfulness of tone with which it may happen 
to be associated ; for Heaven has made smiles as well as tears : 
has made laughter itself, and mirth ; and to appreciate its gifts 
thoroughly is to treat none of them with disrespect, or to affect 
to be above them. The wholly gay and the wholly grave 
spirit is equally but half the spirit of a right human creature. 

I mooted points of faith with myself very early, in conse- 
quence of what I heard at home. The very inconsistencies 
which I observed round about me in matters of belief and 
practice, did but the more make me wish to discover in what 
the right spirit of religion consisted : while, at the same time, 
nobody felt more instinctively than myself, that forms were 
necessary to preserve essence. I had the greatest respect for 
them, wherever I thought them sincere. I got up imitations 
of religious processions in the school-room, and persuaded 
my coadjutors to learn even a psalm in the original Hebrew, 
in order to sing it as part of the ceremony. To make the 
lesson as easy as possible, it was the shortest of all the psalms, 
the hundred and seventeenth, which consists but of two 
verses. A Jew, I am afraid, would have been puzzled to 
recognize it; though, perhaps, I got the tone from his own 
synagogue ; for I was well acquainted with that place of 
worship. I was led to dislike Catholic chapels, in spite of their 
music and their paintings, by what I had read of Inquisitions, 
and by the impiety which I found in the doctrine of eternal 
punishment,— a monstrosity which I never associated with 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 91 

the Church of England, at least not habitually. But identi- 
fying no such dogmas with the Jews, who are indeed free 
from them (though I was not aware of that circumstance 
at the time), and reverencing them for their ancient connec- 
tion with the Bible, I used to go with some of my companions 
to the synagogue in Duke's Place ; where I took pleasure 
in witnessing the semi-Catholic pomp of their service, and 
in hearing their fine singing ; not without something of a 
constant astonishment at their wearing their hats. This cus- 
tom, however, kindly mixed itself up with the recollection 
of my cocked hat and band. I was not aware that it origi- 
nated in the immovable Eastern turban. 

These visits to the synagogue did me, I conceive, a great 
deal of good. They served to universalize my notions of 
religion, and to keep them unbigoted. It never became neces- 
sary to remind me that Jesus was himself a Jew. I have also 
retained through life a respectful notion of the Jews as a body. 

There were some school rhymes about "pork upon a fork," 
and the Jews going to prison. At Easter, a strip of bordered 
paper was stuck on the breast of every boy, containing the 
words " He is risen." It did not give us the slightest thought 
of what it recorded. It only reminded us of an old rhyme, 
which some of the boys used to go about the school re- 
peating: — 

" He is risen, he is risen, 
All the Jews must go to prison." 

A beautiful Christian deduction! Thus has charity itself 
been converted into a spirit of antagonism ; and thus it is that 
the antagonism, in the progress of knowledge, becomes first 
a pastime and then a jest. 

I never forgot the Jews' synagogue, their music, their 
tabernacle, and the courtesy with which strangers were 
allowed to see it. I had the pleasure, before I left school, 
of becoming acquainted with some members of their com- 
munity, who were extremely liberal towards other opinions, 
and who, nevertheless, entertained a sense of the Supreme 
Being far more reverential than I had observed in any 
Christian, my mother excepted. My feelings towards them 
received additional encouragement from the respect shown to 
their history in the paintings of Mr. West, who was anything 
but a bigot himself, and who often had Jews to sit to him. 
I contemplated Moses and Aaron, and the young Levites, by 
the sweet light of his picture-rooms, where everybody trod 



92 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

about in stillness, as though it were a kind of holy ground ; 
and if I met a Kabbi in the street, he seemed to me a man 
coming, not from Bishopsgate or Saffron Hill, but out of the 
remoteness of time. 

I have spoken of the distinguished individuals bred at 
Christ Hospital, including Coleridge and Lamb, who left the 
school not long before I entered it. Coleridge I never saw 
till he was old. Lamb I recollect coming to see the boys, 
with a pensive, brown, handsome, and kindly face, and a gait 
advancing with a motion from side to side, between involun- 
tary consciousness and attempted ease. His brown com- 
plexion may have been owing to a visit in the country ; his 
air of uneasiness to a great burden of sorrow. He dressed 
with a quaker-like plainness. I did not know him as Lamb : 
I took him for a Mr. " Guy," having heard somebody address 
him by that appellative, I suppose in jest. 

The boy whom I have designated in these notices as 

C n, and whose intellect in riper years became clouded, 

had a more than usual look of being the son of old parents. 
He had a reputation among us, which, in more superstitious 
times, might have rendered him an object of dread. We 
thought he knew a good deal out of the pale of ordinary 
inquiries. He studied the weather and the stars, things 
which boys rarely trouble their heads with ; and as I had an 
awe of thunder, which always brought a reverential shade on 
my mother's face, as if God had been speaking, I used to 
send to him on close summer days, to know if thunder was 
to be expected. * 

In connection with this mysterious schoolfellow, though he 
was the last person, in some respects, to be associated with 
him, I must mention a strange epidemic fear which occa- 
sionally prevailed among the boys respecting a pe sonage 
whom they called the Fazzer. 

The Fazzer was known to be nothing more than one of the 
boys themselves. In fact, he consisted of one of the most 
impudent of the bigger ones; but as it was his custom to 
disguise his face, and as this aggravated the terror which 
made the little boys hide their own faces, his participation of 
our common human nature only increased the supernatural 
fearfulness of his pretensions. His office as Fazzer consisted 
in being audacious, unknown, and frightening the boys at 
night ; sometimes by pulling them out of their beds ; some- 
times by simply fazzing their hair (" fazzing" meant pulling 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 93 

or vexing, like a goblin); sometimes (which "was horriblest 
of all) by quietly giving us to understand, in some way or 
other, that the " Fazzer was out," that is to say, out of his 
own bed, and then being seen (by those who dared to look) 
sitting, or otherwise making his appearance, in his white shirt, 
motionless and dumb. It was a very good horror, of its kind. 
The Fazzer was our Dr. Faustus, our elf, our spectre, our 
Flibbertigibbet, who " put knives in our pillows and halters 
in our pews." He w T as Jones, it is true, or Smith; but he 
was also somebody else — an anomaly, a duality, Smith and 
Forcery united. My friend Charles Oilier should have written 
a book about him. He was our Old Man of the Mountain, 
and yet a common boy. 

One night I thought I saw this phenomenon under circum- 
stances more than usually unearthly. It was a fine moonlight 
night ; I was then in a ward the casements of which looked 
(as they still look) on the churchyard. My bed was under 
the second w T indow from the east, not far from the statue of 
Edward the Sixth. Happening to wake in the middle of the 
night, and cast up my eyes, I saw, on a bed's head near me, 
and in one of these casements, a figure in its shirt, which 
I took for the Fazzer. The room was silent ; the figure 
motionless; I fancied that half the boys in the ward were 

glancing at it, without daring to speak. It was poor C n, 

gazing at that lunar orb, which might aftenvards be supposed 
to have malignantly fascinated him. 

Contemporary with C n was Wood, before mentioned, 

whom I admired for his verses, and w r ho was afterwards 
Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, where I visited him, 
and found him, to my astonishment, a head shorter than 
myself. Every upper boy at school appears a giant to a little 
one. " Big boy" and senior are synonymous. Now and 
then, however, extreme smallness in a senior scholar gives a 
new kind of dignity, by reason of the testimony it bears to 
the ascendancy of the intellect. It was the custom for the 
monitors at Christ Hospital, during prayers before meat, to 
stand fronting the tenants of their respective wards, while the 
objects of their attention were kneeling. Looking up, on 
one of these occasions, towards a new monitor who was thus 
standing, and whose face was unknown to me (for there were 
six hundred of us, and his ward was not mine), I thought 
him the smallest boy that could ever have attained to so dis- 
tinguished an eminence. He was little in person, little in 



94 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

face, and lie had a singularly juvenile cast of features, even for 
one so petit. 

It was Mitchell, the translator of Aristophanes. He had 
really attained his position prematurely. I rose afterwards 
to be next to him in the school; and from a grudge that 
existed between us, owing probably to a reserve, which I 
thought pride, on his part, and to an ardency which he may 
have considered frivolous on mine, we became friends. Cir- 
cumstances parted us in after-life : I became a Reformist, and 
he a Quarterly Eeviewer; but he sent me kindly remem- 
brances not long before he died. I did not know he was 
declining; and it will ever be a pain to me to reflect that 
delay conspired with accident to hinder my sense of it from 
being known to him; especially as I learned that he had 
not been so prosperous as I supposed. He had his weaknesses 
as well as myself, but they were mixed with conscientious 
and noble qualities. Zealous as he was for aristocratical 
government, he was no indiscriminate admirer of persons in 
high places ; and, though it would have bettered his views 
in life, he had declined taking orders, from nicety of religious 
scruple. Of his admirable scholarship I need say nothing. 

Equally good scholar, but of a less zealous temperament, 
was Barnes, who stood next me on the Deputy Grecian form, 
and who was afterwards identified with the sudden and 
striking increase of the Times newspaper in fame and in- 
fluence. He was very handsome when young, with a profile 
of Grecian regularity ; and was famous among us for a certain 
dispassionate humour, for his admiration of the works or 
Fielding, and for his delight, nevertheless, in pushing a narra- 
tive to its utmost, and drawing upon his stores of fancy for 
intensifying it ; an amusement for which he possessed an 
understood privilege. It was painful in after-life to see his 
good looks swallowed up in corpulency, and his once hand- 
some mouth thrusting its under lip out, and panting with 
asthma. I believe he was originally so well constituted in 
point of health and bodily feeling, that he fancied he could 
go on, all his life, without taking any of the usual methods 
to preserve his comfort. The editorship of the Times, which 
turned his night into day, and would have been a trying 
burden to any man, completed the bad consequences of his 
negligence ; and he died painfully before he was old. Barnes 
wrote elegant Latin verse, a classical English style, and might 
assuredly have made himself a name in wit and literature, 



SCHOOL-DAYS. 95 

had lie cared nracli for anything beyond his glass of wine and 
his Fielding. He left money to found a Barnes scholarship 
at Cambridge. 

What pleasant days have I not passed with him, and other 
schoolfellows, bathing in the New Eiver, and boating on the 
Thames ! He and I began to learn Italian together ; and 
anybody not within the pale of the enthusiastic, might have 
thought us mad, as we went shouting the beginning of 
Metastasio's Ode to Venus, as loud as we could bawl, over the 
Hornsey fields. I can repeat it to this day, from those first 
lessons. 

" Scendi propizia 
Col tuo splendore, 
bella Yenere, 

Madre d'Amore; 
Madre d'Amore, 

Che sola sei 
Piacer degli uomini, 
E degli dei." * 

On the same principle of making invocations as loud as 
possible, and at the same time of fulfilling the prophecy of a 
poet, and also for the purpose of indulging ourselves with an 
echo, we used to He upon our oars at Richmond, and call, in 
the most vociferous manner, upon the spirit of Thomson to 
" rest." 

" Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, 

When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, 
And oft suspend the dashing oar 
To bid his gentle spirit rest." 

Collins 9 s Ode on the Death of Thomson. 

It was more like " perturbing " his spirit than laying it. 

One day Barnes fell overboard, and, on getting into the 
boat again, he drew a little edition of Seneca out of his 
pocket, which seemed to have become fat with the water. It 
was like an extempore dropsy. 

Another time, several of us being tempted to bathe on a 
very hot day, near Hammersmith, and not exercising suffi- 
cient patience in selecting our spot, we were astonished at 
receiving a sudden lecture from a lady. She w^as in a hat 
and feathers, and riding-habit ; and as the grounds turned 
out to belong to the Margravine of Anspach (Lady Craven), 
we persuaded ourselves that our admonitrix, who spoke in no 

* "Descend propitious with thy brightness, O beautiful Venus, 
Mother of Love ; — Mother of Love, who alone art the pleasure of 
men and of gods." 



96 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

measured terms, was her Serene Highness herself. The 
obvious reply to her was, that if it was indiscreet in us not 
to have chosen a more sequestered spot, it was not exces- 
sively the reverse in a lady to come and rebuke us. I related 
this story to my acquaintance, Sir Eobert Ker Porter, who 
knew her. His observation was, that nothing wonderful was 
to be wondered at in the Margravine. 

I was fifteen when I put oif my band and blue skirts for a 
coat and neckcloth. I was then first Deputy Grecian, and I 
had the honour of going out of the school in the same rank, 
at the same age, and for the same reason, as my friend Charles 
Lamb. The reason was, that I hesitated in my speech. I did 
not stammer half so badly as I used ; and it is very seldom 
that I halt at a syllable now ; but it was understood that a 
Grecian was bound to deliver a public speech before he left 
school, and to go into the Church afterwards ; and as I could 
do neither of these things, a Grecian I could not be. So I 
put on my coat and waistcoat, and, what was stranger, my 
hat ; a very uncomfortable addition to my sensations. For 
eight years I had gone bareheaded, save now and then a few 
inches of pericranium, when the little cap, no larger than a 
crumpet, was stuck on one side, to the mystification of the 
old ladies in the streets. 

I then cared as little for the rains as I did for anything 
else. I had now a vague sense of worldly trouble, and of a 
great and serious change in my condition ; besides which, I 
had to quit my old cloisters, and my playmates, and long 
habits of all sorts ; so that what was a very happy moment 
to schoolboys in general, was to me one of the most painful 
of my life. I surprised my schoolfellows and the master with 
the melancholy of my tears. I took leave of my books, of 
my friends, of my seat in the grammar-school, of my good- 
hearted nurse and her daughter, of my bed, of the cloisters, 
and of the very pump out of which I had taken so many 
delicious draughts, as if I should never see them again, though 
I meant to come every day. The fatal hat was put on ; my 
father was come to fetch me. 

" We, hand in hand, with strange new steps and slow, 
Through Holborn took our meditative way." 



97 
CHAPTER V. 

YOUTH. 

For some time after I left school, I did nothing but visit my 
schoolfellows, haunt the book-stalls, and write verses. My 
father collected the verses, and published them [in 1802, under 
the title of Juvenilia], with a large list of subscribers, numbers 
of whom belonged to his old congregations. [The volume had 
a portrait by Jackson in the manner of that artist, imparti g 
to it an air of heavy laziness, said to have characterized the 
artist, but certainly foreign to the sitter.] I was as proud, 
perhaps, of the book at that time as I am ashamed of it now. 
The French Eevolution, though the worst portion of it was 
over, had not yet shaken up and reinvigorated the sources of 
thought all over Europe. At least I was not old enough, 
perhaps was not able, to get out of the trammels of the regular 
imitative poetry, or versification rather, which was taught in 
the schools. My book was a heap of imitations, all but abso- 
lutely worthless. But absurd as it was, it did me a serious 
mischief; for it made me suppose that I had attained an end, 
instead of not having reached even a commencement ; and 
thus caused me to waste in imitation a good many years 
which I ought to have devoted to the study of the poetical 
art and of nature. Coleridge has praised Boyer for teaching 
us to laugh at " muses " and " Castalian streams ; " but he 
ought rather to have lamented that he did not teach us how 
to love them wisely, as he might have done had he really 
known anything about poetry, or loved Spenser and the old 
poets, as he thought, and admired the new. Even Coleridge's 
juvenile poems were none the better for Boyer's traming. As 
to mine, they were for the most part as mere trash as anti- 
Castalian heart could have desired. I wrote " odes " because 
Collins and Gray had written them, "pastorals" because 
Pope had written them, " blank verse" because Akenside and 
Thomson had written blank verse, and a " Palace of Plea- 
sure " because Spenser had written a " Bower of Bliss." But 
in all these authors I saw little but their words, and imitated 
even those badly. I had nobody to bid me to go to the nature 
which had originated the books. Coleridge's lauded teacher 
put into my hands, at one time, the life of Pope by Euffhead 
(the worst he could have chosen), and at another (for the 

7 



98 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUKT. 

express purpose of cultivating my love of poetry) the Irene 
and other poems of Dr. Johnson ! Pope's smooth but un- 
artistical versification spell-bound me for a long time. Of 
Johnson's poems I retained nothing but the epigram begin- 
ning " Hermit hoar — -" 

" ' Hermit hoar, in solemn cell, 

Wearing out life's evening gray, 
Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell, 

What is bliss, and which the way? f 
Thus I spoke, and speaking, sighed, 

Scarce repressed the starting tear, 
When the hoary sage replied, 

s Come, my lad, and drink some beer.' " 

This was the first epigram of the kind which I had seen ; and 
it had a cautionary effect upon me to an extent which its 
author might hardly have desired. The grave Dr. Johnson 
and the rogue Ambrose de Lamela, in Gil Bias, stood side by 
side in my imagination as unmaskers of venerable appear- 
ances ; that is to say, as persons who had no objection to the 
jolly hypocrisy which they unmasked. 

Not long after the publication of my book, I visited two of 
my schoolfellows, who had gone to Cambridge and Oxford. 
The repute of it, unfortunately, accompanied me, and gave a 
foolish increase to my self-complacency. At Oxford, I was 
introduced to Kett, the poetry professor, — a good-natured 
man with a face like a Houyhnhnm (had Swift seen it, he 
would have thought it a pattern for humanity). It was in 
the garden of the professor's college (Trinity); and he ex- 
pressed a hope that I should feel inspired then "by the muse 
of Warton." I was not acquainted with the writings of 
Warton at that time; and perhaps my ignorance was fortu- 
nate ; for it was not till long after my acquaintance with them 
that I saw farther into their merits than the very first anti- 
commonplaces would have discerned, and as I had not acquired 
even those at that period, and my critical presumption was 
on a par with my poetical, I should probably have given the 
professor to understand that I had no esteem for that kind of 
secondhand inspiration. I was not aware that my own was 
precisely of the same kind, and as different from Warton's as 
poverty from acquirement. 

At Oxford, my love of boating had nearly cost me my life. 
I had already had a bit of a taste of drowning in the river 
Thames, in consequence of running a boat too hastily on 
shore; but it was nothing to what I experienced on this 



YOUTH. 99 

occasion. The schoolfellow whom I was visiting was the 
friend whose family lived in Spring Gardens. We had gone 
out in a little decked skiff, and not expecting disasters in the 
"gentle Ms," I had fastened the sail-line, of which I had 
the direction, in order that I might read a volume which I 
had with me, of Mr. Cumberland's novel called Henry. My 
friend was at the helm. The wind grew a little strong ; and 
we had just got into Iffley Reach, when I heard him exclaim, 
" Hunt, we are over ! " The next moment I was under the 
water, gulping it, and giving myself up for lost. The boat 
had a small opening in the middle of the deck, under which I 
had thrust my feet ; this circumstance had carried me over 
with the boat, and the worst of it was, I found I had got the 
sail-line round my neck. My friend, who sat on the deck 
itself, had been swept off, and got comfortably to shore, which 
was at a little distance. 

My bodily sensations were not so painful as I should have 
fancied they would have been. My mental reflections were 
very different, though one of them, by a singular meeting of 
extremes, was of a comic nature. I thought that I should 
never see the sky again, that I had parted with all my friends, 
and that I was about to contradict the proverb which said that 
a man who was born to be hanged, would never be drowned ; 
for the sail-line, in which I felt entangled, seemed destined to 
perform for me both the offices. On a sudden, I found an oar 
in my hand, and the next minute I was climbing, with assist- 
ance, into a wherry, in which there sat two Oxonians, one of 
them helping me, and loudly and laughingly differing with 
the other, who did not at all like the rocking of the boat, and 
who assured me, to the manifest contradiction of such senses 
as I had left, that there was no room. This gentleman is now 
no more ; and I shall not mention his name, because I might 
do injustice to the memory of a brave man struck with a 
panic. The name of his companion, if I mistake not, was 
Kussell. I hope he was related to an illustrious person of the 
same name, to whom I have lately been indebted for what 
may have been another prolongation of my life. 

On returning to town, which I did on the top of an Oxford 
coach, I was relating this story to the singular person who 
then drove it (Bobart, who had been a collegian), when a 
man who was sitting behind surprised us with the excess of 
his laughter. On asking him the reason, he touched his hat, 
and said, " Sir, I'm his footman.'' Such are the delicacies of 

7—2 



100 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

the livery, and the glorifications of their masters with which 
they entertain the kitchen. 

This Bobart was a very curious person. I have noticed 
him in the Indicator, in the article on " Coaches." He was a 
descendant of a horticultural family, who had been keepers 
of the Physic Garden at Oxford, and one of whom palmed a 
rat upon the learned world for a dragon, by stretching out its 
skin into wings. Tillimant Bobart (for such was the name of 
our charioteer) had been at college himself, probably as a 
sizer ; but having become proprietor of a stage-coach, he 
thought fit to be his own coachman; and he received your 
money and touched his hat like the rest of the fraternity. 
He had a round, red face, with eyes that stared, and showed 
the white ; and having become, by long practice, an excellent 
capper of verses, he was accustomed to have bouts at that 
pastime with the collegians whom he drove. It was curious 
to hear him whistle and grunt, and urge on his horses with 
the other customary euphonies of his tribe, and then see him 
flash his eye round upon the capping gentleman who sat 
behind him, and quote his never-failing line out of Virgil 
or Horace. In the evening (for he only drove his coach half 
way to London) he divided his solace after his labours be- 
tween his book and his brandy-and- water ; but I am afraid 
with a little too much of the brandy, for his end was not 
happy.* There was eccentricity in the family, without any- 
thing much to show for it. The Bobart who invented the 
dragon chuckled over the secret for a long time with a satis- 
faction that must have cost him many falsehoods; and the 
first Bobart that is known used to tag his beard with silver 
on holidays. 

If female society had not been wanting, I should have 
longed to reside at an university; for I have never seen 
trees, books, and a garden to walk in, but I saw my natural 
home, provided there was no " monkery" in it. I have 
always thought it a brave and great saying of Mohammed, — ■ 
u There is no monkery in Islam." 

" From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: 
They are the books, the arts, the academes, 
Which shew, contain, and nourish all the world." 

* On the information of Mr. George Hooper, who kindly volun- 
teered the communication as a reader of the Indicator, and sent me 
a very curious letter on the subject; with details, however, that were 
rather of private than of public interest. 






YOUTH. 101 

Were I to visit the universities now, I should explore every 
corner, and reverently fancy myself in the presence of every 
great and good man that has adorned them ; but the most 
important people to young men are one another ; and I was 
content with glancing at the haunts of Addison and Warton 
in Oxford, and at those of Gray, Spenser, and Milton, in 
Cambridge. Oxford, I found, had greatly the advantage of 
Cambridge in point of country. You could understand well 
enough how poets could wander about Inley and Woodstock ; 
but when I visited Cambridge, the nakedness of the land was 
too plainly visible under a sheet of snow, through which 
gutters of ditches ran, like ink, by the side of leafless sallows, 
which resembled huge pincushions stuck on posts. The town, 
however, made amends ; and Cambridge has the advantage of 
Oxford in a remarkable degree, as far as regards eminent 
names. England's two greatest philosophers, Bacon and 
Newton, and (according to Tyrwhitt) three out of its four 
great poets, were bred there, besides double the number of 
minor celebrities. Oxford even did not always know "the 
good the gods provided." It repudiated Locke; alienated 
Gibbon; and had nothing but angry sullenness and hard ex- 
pulsion to answer to the inquiries which its very ordinances 
encouraged in the sincere and loving spirit of Shelley. 

Yet they are divine places, both ; full of grace, and beauty, 
and scholarship; of reverend antiquity, and ever-young na- 
ture and hope. Their faults, if of worldliness in some, are 
those of time and of conscience in more, and if the more 
pertinacious on those accounts, will merge into a like con- 
servative firmness, when still nobler developments are in their 
keeping. So at least I hope; and so may the Fates have 
ordained ; keeping their gowns among them as a symbol that 
learning is, indeed, something which ever learns ; and in- 
structing them to teach love, and charity, and inquiry, with 
the same accomplished authority as that with which they 
have taught assent. 

My book was unfortunately successful everywhere, parti- 
cularly in the metropolis. The critics were extremely kind ; 
and, as it was unusual at that time to publish at so early a 
period of life, my age made me a kind of " Young Eoscius " 
in authorship. I was introduced to literati, and shown about 
among parties. My father took me to see Dr. Raine, Master 
of the Charter-House. The doctor, who was very kind and 
pleasant, but who probably drew none of our deductions 



102 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

in favour of the young writer's abilities, warned me against 
the perils of authorship; adding, as a final dehortative, that 
" the shelves were full." It was not till we came away that 
I thought of an answer, which I conceived would have 
" annihilated " him. " Then, sir" (I should have said), " we 
will make another." Not having been in time with this 
repartee, I felt all that anguish of undeserved and unnecessary 
defeat, which has been so pleasantly described in the Miseries 
of Human Life. This, thought I, would have been an answer 
befitting a poet, and calculated to make a figure in biography. 

A mortification that I encountered at a house in Cavendish 
Square affected me less, though it surprised me a good deal 
more. I had been held up, as usual, to the example of the 
young gentlemen and the astonishment of the young ladies, 
when, in the course of the dessert, one of mine host's daugh- 
ters, a girl of exuberant spirits, and not of the austerest 
breeding, came up to me, and, as if she had discovered 
that I was not so yormg as I pretended to be, exclaimed, 
" What a beard you have got ! " at the same time convincing 
herself of the truth of her discovery by taking hold of it ! 
Had I been a year or two older, I should have taken my 
revenge. As it was, I know not how I behaved, but the 
next morning I hastened to have a beard no longer. 

I was now a man, and resolved not to be out of countenance 
next time. Not long afterwards, my grandfather, sensible of 
the new fame in his family, but probably alarmed at the 
fruitless consequences to which it might lead, sent me word, 
that if I would come to Philadelphia, " he would make a 
man of me." I sent word, in return, that " men grew in 
England as well as America : " an answer which repaid me 
for the loss of my repartee at Dr. Eaine's. 

I had got a dislike of my grandfather for reasons in which 
his only surviving daughter tells me I was mistaken ; and 
partly on a similar account, I equally disliked his friend Dr. 
Franklin, author of Poor Richard's Almanack: a heap, as it 
appeared to me, of " scoundrel maxims."* I. think I now 

* Thomson's phrase, in the Castle of Indolence, speaking of a 
miserly money-getter : — 

" ' A penny saved is a penny got ;' 

Firm to this scoundrel maxim keepeth he, 

Ne of its rigour will he bate a jot, 

Till it hath quench'd his fire and banished his pot." 

The reader will not imagine that I suppose all money-makers to be 



YOUTH. 103 

appreciate Dr. Franklin as I ought ; but although I can see 
the utility of such publications as his Almanack for a rising 
commercial state, and hold it useful as a memorandum to uncal- 
culating persons like myself, who happen to live in an old one, 
I think there is no necessity for it in commercial nations long 
established, and that it has no business in others, who do not 
found their happiness in that sort of power. Franklin, with 
all his abilities, is but at the head of those who think that 
man lives " by bread alone." 

The respect which, in matters of religion, I felt for the 
" spirit which giveth life," in preference to the " letter which 
killeth," received a curious corroboration from a circum- 
stance which I witnessed on board a Margate hoy. Having 
nothing to do, after the publication of my poor volume, but 
to read and to look about me, a friend proposed an excursion 
to Brighton. We were to go first to Margate, and then 
walk the rest of the way by the sea-side, for the benefit of 
the air. 

We took places accordingly in the first hoy that was about 
to sail, and speedily found ourselves seated and moving. We 
thought the passengers a singularly staid set of people for 
holiday-makers, and could not account for it. The impres- 
sion by degrees grew so strong, that we resolved to inquire 
into the reason ; and it was with no very agreeable feelings, 
that we found ourselves fixed for the day on board what was 
called the " Methodist hoy." The vessel, it seems, was under 
the particular patronage of the sect of that denomination ; and 
it professed to sail " by Divine Providence." 

Dinner brought a little more hilarity into the faces of these 
children of heaven. One innocently proposed a game at 
riddles ; another entertained a circle of hearers by a question 
in arithmetic ; a third (or the same person, if I remember — 
a very dreary gentleman) raised his voice into some remarks 
on " atheists and deists," glancing, while he did it, at the 

of this description. Very gallant spirits are to be found among thera, 
who only take to this mode of activity for want of a better, and are 
as generous in disbursing as they are vigorous in acquiring. You 
may always know the common run, as in other instances, by the 
soreness with which they feel attacks on the body corporate. 

For the assertion that Dr. Franklin cut off his son with a shilling, 
my only authority is family tradition. It is observable, however, 
that the friendliest of his biographers are not only forced to admit 
that he seemed a little too fond of money, but notice the mysterious 
secrecy in which his family history is involved. 



104 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

small knot of the uninitiated who had s;ot together in self- 
defence ; on which a fourth gave out a hymn of Dr. Watts's, 
which says that — 

" Eeligion never was designed 
To make our pleasures less." 

It was sung, I must say, in a tone of the most impartial 
misery, as if on purpose to contradict the opinion. 

Thus passed the hours, between formality, and eating and 
drinking, and psalm-singing, and melancholy attempts at a 
little mirth, till night came on ; when our godly friends 
vanished below into their berths. The wind was against us : 
we beat out to sea, and had a taste of some cold autumnal 
weather. Such of us as were not prepared for this, adjusted 
ourselves as well as we could to the occasion, or paced about 
the deck to warm ourselves, not a little amused with the 
small crew of sailors belonging to the vessel, who sat together 
singing songs in a low tone of voice, in order that the psalm- 
singers below might not hear them. 

During one of these pacings about the deck, my foot came 
in contact with a large bundle which lay as much out of the 
way as possible, but which I had approached unawares. On 
stooping to see what it was, I found it was a woman. She 
was sleeping, and her clothes were cold and damp. As the 
captain could do nothing for her, except refer me to the 
" gentlefolks " below, in case any room could be made for 
her in their dormitory, I repaired below accordingly; and 
with something of a malicious benevolence, persisted in 
waking every sleeper in succession, and stating the woman's 
case. Not a soul would stir. They had paid for their places: 
the woman should have done the same; and so they left her 
to the care of the " Providence " under which they sailed. 
I do not wish to insinuate by this story that many excellent 
people have not been Methodists. All I mean to say is, that 
here was a whole Margate hoy full of them ; that they had 
feathered their nests well below ; that the night was trying ; 
that to a female it might be dangerous; and that not one 
of them, nevertheless, would stir to make room for her. 

As Methodism is a fact of the past and of the present, I 
trust it may have had its uses. The degrees of it are various, 
from the blackest hue of what is called Calvinistic Methodism 
to colours little distinguishable from the mildest and plea- 
santest of conventional orthodoxy. Accidents of birth, breed- 
ing, brain, heart, and temperament make worlds of difference 



YOUTH. 105 

in this respect, as in all others. But where the paramount 
doctrine of a sect, whatever it may profess to include, is Self- 
preservation, and where this paramount doctrine, as it needs 
must when actually paramount, blunts in very self-defence 
the greatest final sympathies with one's fellow-creatures, the 
transition of ideas is easy from unfeelingness in a future state 
to unfeelingness in the present ; and it becomes a very little 
thing indeed to let a woman lie out in the cold all night, while 
saints are snoozing away in comfort. 

My companion and I, much amused, and not a little indig- 
nant, took our way from Eamsgate along the coast, turning 
cottages into inns as our hunger compelled us, and sleeping at 
night the moment we laid our heads on our pillows. 

The length of this journey, which did us good, we reckoned 
to be a hundred and twelve miles; and we did it in four 
days, which was not bad walking. But my brother Robert 
once went a hundred miles in two. He also, when a lad, kept 
up at a kind of trotting pace with a friend's horse all the 
way from Finchley to Pimlico. His limbs were admirably 
well set. 

The friend who was my companion in this journey had not 
been long known to me ; but he was full of good qualities. 
He died a few years afterwards in France, where he unhappily 
found himself among his countrymen, whom Bonaparte so 
iniquitously detained at the commencement of the second 
war. He was brother of my old friend Henry Robertson, 
treasurer of Covent Garden theatre, in whose company and 
that of Vincent Novello, Charles Cowden Clarke, and other 
gifted and estimable men, I have enjoyed some of the most 
harmonious evenings of my life, in every sense of the word. 

Let me revert to a pleasanter recollection. The companion 
of my journey to Brighton, and another brother of his, who 
was afterwards in the Commissariat (all the brothers, alas ! 
are now dead), set up a little club to which I belonged, called 
the " Elders," from our regard for the wine of that name, 
with hot goblets of which we finished the evening. It was 
not the wine so called which you buy in the shops, and 
which is a mixture of brandy and verjuice, but the vintage 
of the genuine berry, which is admired wherever it is known, 
and which the ancients unquestionably symbolized under the 
mystery of the Bearded Bacchus, the senior god of that 
name — 

" Brother of Bacchus, elder born." 



106 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

The great Boerhaave held the tree in such pleasant reverence 
for the multitude of its virtues, that he is said to have taken 
off his hat whenever he passed it. 

Be this as it may, so happily it sent us to our beds, with 
such an extraordinary twofold inspiration of Bacchus and 
Somnus, that, falling to sleep, we would dream half an hour 
after of the last jest, and wake up again in laughter. 



CHAPTER VI. 

PLAYGOING AND VOLUNTEERS. 

A knock at the doors of all England awoke us up from our 
dreams. It was Bonaparte, threatening to come among us, 
and bidding us put down " that glass." The " Elders," in 
common with the rest of the world, were moved to say him 
nay, and to drink, and drill themselves, to his confusion. 

I must own that I never had the slightest belief in this 
coming of Bonaparte. It did, I allow, sometimes appear to me 
not absolutely impossible ; and very strange it was to think 
that some fine morning I might actually find myself face 
to face with a parcel of Frenchmen in Kent or Sussex, 
instead of playing at soldiers in Piccadilly. But I did not 
believe in his coming: first, because I thought he had far 
wiser things to attend to ; secondly, because he made such an 
ostentatious show of it ; and thirdly, because I felt that what- 
ever might be our party politics, it was not in the nature of 
things English to allow it. Nobody, I thought, could believe 
it possible, who did but see and hear the fine, unaffected, 
manly young fellows that composed our own regiment of volun- 
teers, the St. James's, and whose counterparts had arisen in 
swarms all over the country. It was too great a jest. And 
with all due respect for French valour, I think so to this day. 

The case was not the same as in the time of the Normans. 
The Normans were a more advanced people than the Saxons ; 
they possessed a familiar and family interest among us ; and 
they had even a right to the throne. But in the year 1802, 
the French and English had for centuries been utterly dis- 
tinct as well as rival nations ; the latter had twice beaten 
the French on French ground, and under the greatest dis- 
advantages : how much less likely were they to be beaten on 



PLAYGOIKG AND VOLUNTEEES. 107 

their own, under every circumstance of exasperation ? They 
were an abler-bodied nation than the French; they had been 
bred up, however erroneously, in a contempt for them, which 
(in a military point of view) was salutary when it was not 
careless ; and, in fine, here were all these volunteers, as well 
as troops of the line, taking the threat with an ease too great 
even to laugh at it, but at the same time sedulously attending 
to their drills, and manifestly resolved, if the struggle came, 
to make a personal business of it, and see which of the two 
nations had the greatest pluck. 

The volunteers would not even take the trouble of patro- 
nizing a journal that was set up to record their movements 
and to flatter their self-respect. A word of praise from the 
king, from the commander-in-chief, or the colonel of the 
regiment, was well enough ; it was all in the way of business ; 
but why be told what they knew, or be encouraged when they 
did not require it? Wags used to say of the journal in 
question, which was called the Volunteer, that it printed only 
one number, sold only one copy, and that this copy had been 
purchased by a volunteer drummer-boy. The boy, seeing 
the paper set out for sale, exclaimed, " The Volunteer I why, 
I'm a volunteer ; " and so he bought that solitary image of 
himself. The boy was willing to be told that he was doing 
something more than playing at soldiers ; but what was this 
to the men ? 

This indifferent kind of self-respect and contentment did 
not hinder the volunteers, however, from having a good deal 
of pleasant banter of one another among themselves, or from 
feeling that there was something now and then among them 
ridiculous in respect to appearances. A gallant officer in our 
regiment, who was much respected, went among us by the 
name of Lieutenant Molly, on account of the delicacy of his 
complexion. Another, who was a strict disciplinarian, and 
had otherwise a spirit of love for the profession, as though he 
had been a born soldier, w r as not spared allusions to his balls 
of perfumery. Our major (now no more) was an undertaker 
in Piccadilly, of the name of Downs, very fat and jovial, yet 
active withal, and a good soldier. He had one of those 
lively, juvenile faces that are sometimes observed in people of 
a certain sleek kind of corpulency. This ample field-officer 
was "cut and come again" for jokes of all sorts. Nbr was 
the colonel himself spared, though he was a highly respect- 
able nobleman, and nephew to an actual troop-of-the-line 



108 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

conqueror, the victor of Montreal. But this requires a para- 
graph or two to itself. 

We had been a regiment for some time without a colonel. 
The colonel was always about to be declared, but declared he 
was not ; and meantime we mustered about a thousand strong, 
and were much amazed, and, perhaps, a little indignant. At 
length the moment arrived — the colonel was named ; he was 
to be introduced to us ; and that nothing might be wanting 
to our dignity, he was a lord, and a friend of the minister, 
and nephew to the victor aforesaid. 

Our parade was the court-yard of Burlington House. The 
whole regiment attended. We occupied three sides of the 
ground. In front of us w r ere the great gates, longing to be 
opened. Suddenly the word is given, " My lord is at hand !" 
Open burst the gates — up strikes the music. " Present 
arms!" vociferates the major. 

In dashes his lordship, and is pitched right over his horse's 
head to the ground. 

It was the most unfortunate anticlimax that could have 
happened. Skill, grace, vigour, address, example, ascendancy, 
mastery, victory, all were in a manner to have been pre- 
sented to us in the heroical person of the noble colonel ; and 
here they were, prostrated at our feet — ejected — cast out — 
humiliated — ground to the earth — subjected (for his merciful 
construction) to the least fellow-soldier that stood among us 
upright on his feet. 

The construction, however, was accorded. Everybody felt 
indeed, that the greatest of men might have been subjected to 
the accident. It was the horse, not he, that was in fault — it 
was the music — the ringing of the arms, &c. His spirit had 
led him to bring with him too fiery a charger. Bucephalus 
might have thrown Alexander at such a moment. A mole- 
hill threw William the Third. A man might conquer 
Bonaparte, and yet be thrown from his horse. And the con- 
clusion was singularly borne out in another quarter ; for no 
conqueror, I believe, whose equitation is ascertained, ever 
combined more numerous victories with a greater number of 
falls from his saddle than his lordship's illustrious friend, the 
Duke of Wellington. 

During our field-days, which sometimes took place in the 
neighbourhood celebrated by Foote in his Mayor of Garrett, 
it was impossible for those who were acquainted with his 
writings not to think of his city-trained bands and their 



PLAYGOING- A*TD VOLUNTEERS. 109 

dreadful " marchings and counter-marchings from Acton to 
Ealing, and from Ealing back again to Acton." We were 
not " all robbed and murdered," however, as we returned 
home, " by a single footpad." We returned, not by the 
Ealing stage, but in right warlike style, marching and dusty. 
We had even, one day, a small taste of the will and appetite 
of campaigning. Some of us, after a sham-fight, were hasten- 
ing towards Acton, in a very rage of hunger and thirst, when 
we discerned coming towards us a baker with a basket full of 
loaves. To observe the man, to see his loaves scattered on 
the around, to find ourselves each with one of them under 
his arm, tearing the crumb out, and pushing on for the 
village, heedless of the cries of the pursuing baker, was (in 
the language of the novelists) the work of a moment. Next 
moment we found ourselves standing in the cellar of an Acton 
alehouse, with the spigots torn out of the barrels, and every- 
body helping himself as he could. The baker and the beer- 
man were paid, but not till we chose to attend to them ; and 
I fully comprehended, even from this small specimen of the 
will and pleasure of soldiers, what savages they could become 
on graver occasions. 

In this St. James's regiment of volunteers were three 
persons whom I looked on with great interest, for they were 
actors. They were Farley, Emery, and De Camp, all well- 
known performers at the time. The first was a celebrated 
melodramatic actor, remarkable for combining a short 
sturdy person with energetic activity; for which reason, if I 
am not mistaken, in spite of his shortness and his sturdiness, 
he had got into the light infantry company, where I think I 
have had the pleasure of standing both with him and Mr. De 
Camp. With De Camp certainly. The latter was brother 
of Miss De Camp, afterwards Mrs. Charles Kemble, an 
admirable actress in the same line as Farley, and in such 
characters as Beatrice and Lucy Lockitt. She had a beau- 
tiful figure, fine large dark eyes, and elevated features, fuller 
of spirit than softness, but still capable of expressing great 
tenderness. Her brother was nobody in comparison with 
her, though he was clever in his way, and more handsome. 
But it was a sort of effeminate beauty, which made him look 
as if he ought to have been the sister, and she the brother. 
It was said of him, in a comprehensive bit of alliteration, that 
he " failed in fops, but there was fire in his footmen." 

The third of these histrionic patriots, Mr. Emery, was one 



110 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

of the best actors of his kind the stage ever saw. He ex- 
celled, not only in Yorkshiremen, and other rustical comic 
characters, but in parts of homely tragedy, such as criminals 
of the lower order ; whose conscious guilt he exhibited with 
such a lively, truthful mixture of clownishness in the mode 
and intensity in the feeling, as made a startling and terrible 
picture of the secret passions to which all classes of men are 
liable. 

Emery was also an amateur painter — of landscape, I 
believe, and of no mean repute. He was a man of a middle 
height, rather tall perhaps than otherwise, and with quiet, 
respectable manners; but with something of what is called a 
pudding face, and an appearance on the whole not unlike a 
gentleman farmer. You would not have supposed there was 
so much emotion in him, though he had purpose, too, in his 
look, and he died early. 

I have been tempted to dilate somewhat on these gentle- 
men ; for though I made no acquaintance with them privately, 
I was now beginning to look with peculiar interest on. the 
stage, to which I had already wished to be a contributor, and 
of which I was then becoming a critic. I had written a 
tragedy, a comedy, and a farce; and my Spring Garden 
friends had given me an introduction to their acquaintance, 
Mr, Kelly, of the Opera House, with a view to having the 
farce brought out by some manager with whom he was intimate. 
I remember lighting upon him at the door of his music-shop 
or saloon, at the corner of the lane in Pall Mall, where the 
Arcade now begins, and giving him my letter of introduction 
and my farce at once. He had a quick, snappish, but not 
ill-natured voice, and a flushed, handsome, and good-humoured 
face, with the hair about his ears. The look was a little 
rakish or so, but very agreeable. 

Mr. Kelly was extremely courteous to me ; but what he 
said of the farce, or did with it, I utterly forget. Himself I 
shall never forget ; for as he was the first actor I ever beheld 
anywhere, so he was one of the first whom I saw on the stage. 
Actor, indeed, he was none, except inasmuch as he was an 
acting singer, and not destitute of a certain spirit in every- 
thing he did. Neither had he any particular power as a 
singer, or even a voice. He said it broke down while he was 
studying in Italy ; where, indeed, he had sung with applause. 
The little snappish tones I spoke of were very manifest on 
the stage: he had short arms, as if to match them, and a 



PLAYGOIKG- AND VOLUNTEERS. Ill 

hasty step: and yet, notwithstanding these drawbacks, he 
was heard with pleasure, for he had taste and feeling. He 
was a delicate composer, as the music in Blue Beard evinces ; 
and he selected so happily from other composers, as to give 
rise to his friend Sheridan's banter, that he was an " importer 
of music and composer of wines" (for he once took to being a 
wine-merchant). While in Ireland, during the early part of 
his career, he adapted a charming air of Martini's to English 
words, which, under the title of " Oh, thou wert born to 
please me," he sang with Mrs. Crouch to so much effect, that 
not only was it always called for three times, but no play was 
suffered to be performed without it. It should be added, that 
Mrs. Crouch was a lovely woman, as well as a beautiful 
singer, and that the two performers were in love. I have 
heard them sing it myself, and do not wonder at the impres- 
sion it made on the susceptible hearts of the Irish. Twenty 
years afterwards, when Mrs. Crouch was no more, and while 
Kelly was singing a duet in the same country with Madame 
Catalani, a man in the gallery cried out, " Mr. Kelly, will you 
be good enough to favour us with ' Oh, thou wert born to 
please me?'" The audience laughed; but the call went to 
the heart of the singer, and probably came from that of the 
honest fellow who made it. The man may have gone to the 
play in his youth, with somebody whom he loved by his side, 
and heard two lovers, as happy as himself, sing what he now 
wished to hear again. 

Madame Catalani was also one of the singers I first re- 
member. I first heard her at an oratorio, where, happening 
to sit in a box right opposite to where she stood, the leaping 
forth of her amazingly powerful voice absolutely startled me. 
Women's voices on the stage are apt to rise above all others, 
but Catalani's seemed to delight in trying its strength with 
choruses and orchestras ; and the louder they became, the 
higher and more victorious she ascended. In fact, I believe 
she is known to have provoked and enjoyed this sort of con- 
test. I suspect, however, that I did not hear her when she 
was at her best or sweetest. My recollection is, that with a 
great deal of taste and brilliancy, there was more force than 
feeling. She was a Eoman, with the regular Italian antelope 
face (if I may so call it) ; large eyes, with a sensitive elegant 
nose, and lively expression. 

Mrs. Billington also appeared to me to have more brilliancy 
of execution than depth of feeling. She was a fat beauty, 



112 AtTTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

with regular features, and may be seen drawn to the life, in a 
portrait in Mr. Hogarth's Memoirs of the Musical Drama, 
where she is frightfully dressed in a cropped head of hair, 
and a waist tucked under her arms — the fashion of the day. 

Not so Grassini, a large but perfectly well-made as well as 
lovely woman, with black hair and eyes, and her countenance 
as full of feeling as her divine contralto voice. Largeness, 
or what is called fineness of person, was natural to her, and 
did not hinder her from having a truly feminine appearance. 
She was an actress as well as singer. She acted Proserpina 
in Winter's beautiful opera, and might have remained in the 
recollection of any one who heard and beheld her, as an image 
of the goddess she represented. My friend, Yincent Novello, 
saw the composer when the first performance of the piece 
was over, stoop down (he was a very tall man) and kiss 
Mrs. Billington's hand for her singing in the character of 
Ceres. I wonder he did not take Grassini in his arms. She 
must have had a fine soul, and would have known how to 
pardon him. But, perhaps he did. 

With Billington used to perform Braham, from whose 
wonderful remains of power in his old age we may judge 
what he must have been in his prime. I mean, with regard 
to voice ; for as to general manner and spirit, it is a curious 
fact that, except when he was in the act of singing, he used 
to be a remarkably insipid performer; and that it was not 
till he was growing elderly that he became the animated 
person we now see him. This, too, he did all on a sudden, 
to the amusement as well as astonishment of the beholders. 
When he sang, he was always animated. The probability is, 
that he had been bred up under masters who were wholly 
unth eatrical, and that something had occurred to set his 
natural spirit reflecting on the injustice they had done him ; 
though, for a reason which I shall give presently, the theatre, 
after all, was not the best field for his abilities. He had won- 
derful execution as well as force, and his voice could also be 
very sweet, though it was too apt to betray something of that 
nasal tone which has been observed in Jews, and which is, 
perhaps, quite as much, or more, a habit in which they have 
been brought up than a consequence of organization. The 
same thing has been noticed in Americans ; and it might not 
be difficult to trace it to moral, and even to monied causes; 
those, to wit, that induce people to retreat inwardly upon them- 
selves ; into a sense of their shrewdness and resources ; and to 



PLAYGOER AND VOLUNTEERS. 113 

clap their finger in self- congratulation upon the organ through 
which it pleases them occasionally to intimate as much to a 
bystander, not choosing to trust it wholly to the mouth. 

Perhaps it was in some measure the same kind of breeding 
(I do not say it in disrespect, but in reference to matters of 
caste, far more discreditable to Christians than Jews) which 
induced Mr. Braham to quit the Italian stage, and devote 
himself to his popular and not very refined style of bravura- 
singing on the English. It was what may be called the loud- 
and-soft style. There was admirable execution ; but the 
expression consisted in being very soft on the words love, 
peace, &c, and then bursting into roars of triumph on the 
words hate, war, and glory. To this pattern Mr. Braham 
composed many of the songs written for him ; and the public 
were enchanted with a style which enabled them to fancy that 
they enjoyed the highest style of the art, while it required 
only the vulgarest of their perceptions. This renowned 
vocalist never did himself justice except in the compositions 
of Handel. When he stood in the concert -room or the 
oratorio, and opened his mouth with plain, heroic utterance in 
the mighty strains of " Deeper and deeper still," or " Sound 
an alarm," or, " Comfort ye my people," you felt indeed that 
you had a great singer before you. His voice which too often 
sounded like a horn vulgar, in the catchpenny lyrics of 
Tom Dibdin, now became a veritable trumpet of grandeur 
and exaltation; the tabernacle of his creed seemed to open 
before him in its most victorious days ; and you might have 
fancied yourself in the presence of one of the sons of Aaron, 
calling out to the host of the people from some platform occu- 
pied by their prophets. 

About the same time Pasta made her first appearance in 
England, and produced no sensation. She did not even seem 
to attempt any. Her nature was so truthful, that, having as 
yet no acquirements to display, it would appear that she did 
not pretend she had. She must either have been prematurely 
put forward by others, or, with an instinct of her future great- 
ness, supposed that the instinct itself would be recognized. 
When she came the second time, after completing her studies, 
she took rank at once as the greatest genius in her line which 
the Italian theatre in England had witnessed. She was a great 
tragic actress ; and her singing, in point of force, tenderness, 
and expression, was equal to her acting. All noble passions 
belonged to her; and her very scorn seemed equally noble, for 

8 






114 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

it trampled only on what was mean. When she measured her 
enemy from head to foot, in Tancredi, you really felt for the 
man, at seeing him so reduced into nothingness. When she 
made her entrance on the stage, in the same character — which 
she did right in front of the audience, midway between the 
side scenes, she waved forth her arms, and drew them quietly 
together again over her bosom, as if she sweetly, yet modestly, 
embraced the whole house. And when, in the part of Medea, 
she looked on the children she was about to kill, and tenderly 
parted their hair, and seemed to mingle her very eyes in lov- 
ingness with theirs, uttering, at the same time, notes of the 
most wandering and despairing sweetness, every gentle eye 
melted into tears. She wanted height, and had somewhat too 
much flesh ; but it seemed the substance of the very health 
of her body, which was otherwise shapely. Her head and 
bust were of the finest classical mould. An occasional rough- 
ness in her lower tones did but enrich them with passion, as 
people grow hoarse with excess of feeling ; and while her 
voice was in its prime, even a little incorrectness now and then 
in the notes would seem the consequence of a like boundless 
emotion ; but, latterly, it argued a failure of ear, and consoled 
the mechanical artists who had been mystified by her success. 
In every other respect, perfect truth, graced by idealism, was 
the secret of Pasta's greatness. She put truth first always ; 
and, in so noble and sweet a mind, grace followed it as a natu- 
ral consequence. 

With the exception of Lablache, that wonderful barytone 
singer, full of might as well as mirth, in whom the same truth, 
accompanied in some respects by the same grace of feeling, 
suffered itself to be overlaid with comic fat (except when he 
turned it into an heroic amplitude with drapery), I remember 
no men on our Italian stage equal to the women. Women 
have carried the palm out and out, in acting, singing, and 
dancing. The pleasurable seems more the forte of the sex ; 
and the opera house is essentially a palace of pleasure, even in 
its tragedy. Bitterness there cannot but speak sweetly ; there 
is no darkness, and no poverty ; and every death is the death 
of the swan. When the men are sweet, they either seem 
feeble, or, as in the case of Eubini, have execution without 
passion. Naldi was amusing ; Tramezzani was elegant ; Am- 
brogetti (whose great big calves seemed as if they ought to 
have saved him from going into La Trappe) was a fine dash- 
ing representative of Don Juan, without a voice. But what 



PLAYGCOTG- AKD VOLUNTEERS. 115 

were these in point of impression on the public, compared 
with the woman I have mentioned, or even with voluptuous 
Fodor, with amiable Sontag, with charming Malibran (whom 
I never saw), or with adorable Jenny Lind (whom, as an 
Irishman would say, I have seen still less ; for not to see her 
appears to be a deprivation beyond all ordinary conceptions 
of musical loss and misfortune) ? 

As to dancers, male dancers are almost always gaivkies, 
compared with female. One forgets the names of the best of 
them ; but who, that ever saw, has forgotten Heberle, or 
Cerito, or Taglioni ? There was a great noise once in France 
about the Vestrises ; particularly old Vestris ; but (with all 
due respect to our gallant neighbours) I have a suspicion that 
he took the French in with the gravity and imposingness of his 
twirls. There was an imperial demand about Vestris, likely 
to create for him a corresponding supply of admiration. The 
most popular dancers of whom I have a recollection, when I 
was young, were Deshayes, who was rather an elegant posture- 
master than dancer, and Madame Parisot, who was very thin, 
and always smiling. I could have seen little dancing in those 
times, or I should have something to say of the Presles, 
Didelots, and others, who turned the heads of the Yarmouths 
and Barrymores of the day. Art, in all its branches, has 
since grown more esteemed ; and I suspect that neither 
dancing nor singing ever attained so much grace and beauty 
as they have done within the last twenty years. The Fari- 
nellis and Pacchierottis were a kind of monsters of execution. 
There were tones, also, in their voices which, in all proba- 
bility, were very touching. But, to judge from their printed 
songs, their chief excellence lay in difficult and everlasting 
roulades. And we may guess, even now, from the prevailing 
character of French dancing, that difficulty was the great 
point of conquest with Vestris. There was no such graceful 
understanding between the playgoers and the performers, no 
such implied recognition of the highest principles of emotion, 
as appears to be the case in the present day with the Taglionis 
and Jenny Linds. 

To return to the English boards, — the first actor whom I 
remember seeing upon them was excellent Jack Bannister. 
He was a handsome specimen of the best kind of Englishman, 
— jovial, manly, good-humoured, unaffected, with a great deal 
of whim and drollery, but never passing the bounds of the de- 
corous ; and when he had made you laugh heartily as some 

8—2 



116 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUInT. 

yeoman or seaman in a comedy, he could bring the tears into 
your eyes for some honest sufferer in an afterpiece. He gave 
you the idea of a good fellow, — a worthy household humourist, 
—whom it would be both pleasant and profitable to live with; 
and this was his real character. He had a taste for pictures, 
and settled down into a good English gout and the love of his 
family. I saw him one day hobbling with a stick in Gower 
Street, where he lived, and the same evening performing the 
part either of the young squire, Tony Lumpkin, in She Stoops 
to Conquer, or of Acres, in the Comedy of the Rivals, I forget 
which ; but in either character he would be young to the last. 
Next day he would perform the old father, the Brazier, in 
Colman's sentimental comedy, John Bull; and everybody 
would see that it was a father indeed who was suffering. 

This could not be said of Fawcett in the same character, 
who roared like Bull, but did not feel like John. He was 
affecting, too, in his way; but it was after the fashion of a 
great noisy boy, whom you cannot help pitying for his tears, 
though you despise him for his vulgarity. Fawcett had a 
harsh, brazen face, and a voice like a knife-grinder's wheel. 
He was all pertness, coarseness, and effrontery, but with a 
great deal of comic force; and whenever he came trotting on 
to the stage (for such was his walk) and pouring forth his 
harsh, rapid words, with his nose in the air, and a facetious 
grind in his throat, the audience were prepared for a merry 
evening. 

Munden was a comedian famous for the variety and sig- 
nificance of his grimaces, and for making something out of 
nothing by a certain intensity of contemplation. Lamb, with 
exquisite wit, described him in one sentence, by saying, that 
Munden " beheld a leg of mutton in its quiddity.' ' If he laid 
an emphasis on the word " Holborn," or " button," he did it 
in such a manner that you thought there was more in " Hol- 
born," or " button," than it ever before entered into your 
head to conceive. I have seen him, while playing the part of 
a vagabond loiterer about inn-doors, look at, and gradually 
approach, a pot of ale on a table from a distance, for ten 
minutes together, while he kept the house in roars of laughter 
by the intense idea which he dumbly conveyed of its contents, 
and the no less intense manifestation of his cautious but in- 
flexible resolution to drink it. So, in acting the part of a 
credulous old antiquary, on whom an old beaver is palmed for 
the "hat of William Tell," he reverently put the hat on his 



PLAYGOIXG AND VOLUNTEERS. 117 

Lead, and then solemnly walked to and fro with such an ex- 
cessive sense of the glory with which he was crowned, such a 
weight of reflected heroism, and accumulation of Tell's whole 
history on that single representative culminating point, ele- 
gantly halting every now and then to put himself in the atti- 
tude of one drawing a bow, that the spectators could hardly 
have been astonished had they seen his hair stand on end, and 
carry the hat aloft with it. But I must not suffer myself to 
be led into these details. 

Lewis was a comedian of the rarest order, for he combined 
whimsicality with elegance, and levity with heart. He was 
the fop, the lounger, the flatterer, the rattlebrain, the sower of 
wild oats ; and in all he was the gentleman. He looked on 
the stage what he was off it, the companion of wits and men 
of quality. It is pleasant to know that he was a descendant 
of Erasmus Lewis, the secretary of Lord Oxford, and friend 
of Pope and Swift. He was airiness personified. He had a 
light person, light features, a light voice, a smile that showed 
the teeth, with good-humoured eyes; and a genial levity per- 
vaded his action, to the very tips of his delicately-gloved 
fingers. He drew on his glove like a gentleman, and then 
darted his fingers at the ribs of the character he was talking 
with, in a way that carried with it whatever was suggestive, 
and sparkling, and amusing. When he died, they put up a 
classical Latin inscription to his memory, about elegantice and 
lepores (whims and graces) ; and you felt that no man better 
deserved it. He had a right to be recorded as the type of airy 
genteel comedy. 

Elliston was weightier both in manner and person ; and he 
was a tragedian as well as comedian. Not a great tragedian, 
though able to make a serious and affecting impression; and 
when I say weightier in 'comedy than Lewis, I do not mean 
heavy ; but that he had greater bodily substance and force. 
In Sir Harry Wilclair, for instance, he looked more like the 
man who could bear rakery and debauch. The engraved 
portrait of him in a coat bordered with fur is very like. He 
had dry as well as genial humour, was an admirable represen- 
tative of the triple hero in Three and the Deivce, of Charles 
Surface, Don Felix, the Duke in the Honeymoon, and of all 
gallant and gay lovers of a robust order, not omitting the most 
cordial. Indeed, he was the most genuine lover that I ever 
saw on the stage. No man approached a woman as he did, — 
with so flattering a mixture of reverence and passion — such 



118 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

closeness without insolence, and such a trembling energy in 
his words. His utterance of the single word "charming" 
was a volume of rapturous fervour. I speak, of course, only 
of his better days. Latterly, he grew flustered with impru- 
dence and misfortune ; and from the accounts I have heard of 
his acting, nobody who had not seen him before could have 
guessed what sort of man he had been. Elliston, like Lewis, 
went upon the stage with advantages of training and connec- 
tions. He was nephew of Dr. Elliston, master of one of the 
colleges at Cambridge ; and he was educated at Saint Paul's 
school. 

These are the actors of those days whom I recollect with 
the greatest pleasure. I include Fawcett, because he was 
identified with some of the most laughable characters in 
farce. 

To touch on some others. Liston was renowned for an 
exquisitely ridiculous face and manner, rich with half-con- 
scious, half-unconscious absurdity. The whole piece became 
Listonized the moment he appeared. People longed for his 
coming back, in order that they might dote on his oily, 
mantling face, and laugh with him and at him. 

Mathews was a genius in mimicry, a facsimile in mind as 
well as manner ; and he was a capital Sir Fretful Plagiary. 
It was a sight to see him looking wretchedly happy at his 
victimizers, and digging deeper and deeper into his morti- 
fication at every fresh button of his coat that he buttoned 
up. 

Dowton was perfect in such characters as Colonel Oldboy 
and Sir Anthony Absolute. His anger was no petty irrita- 
bility, but the boiling of a rich blood, and of a will otherwise 
genial. He was also by far the best Falstaff. 

Cooke, a square-faced, hook-nosed, wide-mouthed, malig- 
nantly smiling man, was intelligent and peremptory, and a 
hard hitter : he seized and strongly kept your attention ; but 
he was never pleasant. He was too entirely the satirist, the 
hypocrite, and the villain. He loved too fondly his own 
caustic and rascally words; so that his voice, which was 
otherwise harsh, was in the habit of melting and dying away 
inwardly in the secret satisfaction of its smiling malignity. 
As to his vaunted tragedy, it was a mere reduction of Shak- 
speare's poetry into indignant prose. He limited every cha- 
racter to its worst qualities ; and had no idealism, no affec- 
tions, no verse. 



PLAYGOING AND VOLUNTEERS. 119 

Kemble was a god compared with Cooke, as far as the ideal 
was concerned; though, on the other hand, I never could 
admire Kemble as it was the fashion to do. He was too 
artificial, too formal, too critically and deliberately conscious. 
Nor do I think that he had any genius whatsoever. His 
power was all studied acquirement. It was this, indeed, by 
the help of his stern Eoman aspect, that made the critics like 
him. It presented, in a noble shape, the likeness of their own 
capabilities. 

Want of genius could not be imputed to his sister, Mrs. 
Siddons. I did not see her, I believe, in her best days ; but 
she must always have been a somewhat masculine beauty ; 
and she had no love in her, apart from other passions. She 
was a mistress, however, of lofty, of queenly, and of appalling 
tragic effect. Nevertheless, I could not but think that some- 
thing of too much art was apparent even in Mrs. Siddons; 
and she failed, I think, in the highest points of refinement. 
When she smelt the blood on her hand, for instance, in 
Macbeth, in the scene where she walked in her sleep, she made 
a face of ordinary disgust, as though the odour were offensive 
to the senses, not appalling to the mind. 

Charles Kemble, who had an ideal face and figure, was the 
nearest approach I ever saw to Shakspeare's gentlemen, and 
to heroes of romance. He also made an excellent Cassio. 
But with the exception of Mrs. Siddons, who was declining, 
all the reigning school of tragedy had retrograded rather than 
otherwise, towards the time that preceded Garrick; and the 
consequence was, that when Kean brought back nature and 
impulse, he put an end to it at once, as Garrick had put an 
end to Quin. 

In comedy nature had never been wanting ; and there was 
one comic actress, who was nature herself in one of her most 
genial forms. This was Mrs. Jordan ; who, though she was 
neither beautiful, nor handsome, nor even pretty, nor accom- 
plished, nor " a lady," nor anything conventional or comme il 
faut whatsoever, yet was so pleasant, so cordial, so natural, 
so full of spirits, so healthily constituted in mind and body, 
had such a shapely leg withal, so charming a voice, and such 
a happy and happy-making expression of countenance, that 
she ajopeared something superior to all those requirements of 
acceptability, and to hold a patent from nature herself for our 
delight and good opinion. It is creditable to the feelings of 
society in general, that allowances are made for the tempta- 



120 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

tions to which the stage exposes the sex ; and in Mrs. Jor- 
dan's case these were not diminished by a sense of the like 
consideration due to princely restrictions, and to the manifest 
domestic dispositions of more parties than one. But she 
made even Methodists love her. A touching story is told of 
her apologizing to a poor man of that persuasion for having 
relieved him. He had asked her name ; and she expressed a 
hope that he would not feel offended when the name was told 
him. On hearing it, the honest Methodist (he could not 
have been one on board the hoy) shed tears of pity and admi- 
ration, and trusted that he could not do wrong in begging a 
blessing on her head. 

(Serious Bevieiver, interrupting. But, my good sir, suppose 
some of your female readers should take it into their heads to 
be Mrs. Jordan ? 

Author. Oh, my good sir, don't be alarmed. My female 
readers are not persons to be so much afraid for, as you seem 
to think yours are. The stage itself has taught them large 
measures both of charity and discernment. They have not 
been so locked up in restraint, as to burst out of bounds the 
moment they see a door open for consideration.) 

Mrs. Jordan was inimitable in exemplifying the conse- 
quences of too much restraint in ill-educated Country Girls, 
in Eomps, in Hoydens, and in Wards on whom the mercenary 
have designs. She wore a bib and tucker, and pinafore, 
with a bouncing propriety, fit to make the boldest spectator 
alarmed at the idea of bringing such a household responsi- 
bility on his shoulders. To see her when thus attired shed 
blubbering tears for some disappointment, and eat all the 
while a great thick slice of bread and butter, weeping, and 
moaning, and munching, and eyeing at every bite the part 
she meant to bite next, was a lesson against will and appetite 
worth a hundred sermons of our friends on board the hoy; 
and, on the other hand, they could assuredly have done and 
said nothing at all calculated to make such an impression in 
favour of amiableness as she did, when she acted in gentle, 
generous, and confiding characters. The way in which she 
would take a friend by the cheek and kiss her, or make up a 
quarrel with a lover, or coax a guardian into good-humour, 
or sing (without accompaniment) the song of " Since then 
I'm doom'd," or " In the dead of the night," trusting, as 
she had a right to do, and as the house wished her to do, to 
the sole effect of her sweet, mellow, and loving voice — the 



PLAYGOING- AND VOLUNTEERS. 121 

reader will pardon me, but tears of pleasure and regret come 
into my eyes at the recollection, as if she personified what- 
soever was happy at that period of life, and which has gone 
like herself. The very sound of the little familiar word bud 
from her lips (the abbreviation of husband), as she packed 
it closer, as it were, in the utterance, and pouted it up with 
fondness in the man's face, taking him at the same time by 
the chin, was a w T hole concentrated world of the power of 
loving. 

That is a pleasant time of life, the playgoing time in 
youth, when the coach is packed full to go to the theatre, and 
brothers and sisters, parents and lovers (none of whom, 
perhaps, go very often) are all wafted together in a flurry of 
expectation ; when the only wish as they go (except with the 
lovers) is to go as fast as possible, and no sound is so delightful 
as the cry of " Bill of the Play ; " when the smell of links in 
the darkest and muddiest winter's night is charming; and 
the steps of the coach are let down ; and a roar of hoarse 
voices round the door, and mud-shine on the pavement, are 
accompanied with the sight of the warm-looking lobby which 
is about to be entered; and they enter, and pay, and ascend 
the pleasant stairs, and begin to hear the silence of the house, 
perhaps the first jingle of the music; and the box is entered 
amidst some little awkwardness in descending to their places, 
and being looked at ; and at length they sit, and are become 
used to by their neighbours, and shawls and smiles are 
adjusted, and the play-bill is handed round or pinned to the 
cushion, and the gods are a little noisy, and the music veri- 
tably commences, and at length the curtain is drawn up, and 
the first delightful syllables are heard : — - 

" Ah ! my dear Charles, when did you see the lovely 
Olivia?" 

" Oh ! my dear Sir George, talk not to me of Olivia. The 
cruel guardian," &c. 

Anon the favourite of the party makes his appearance, and 
then they are quite happy; and next day, besides his own 
merits, the points of the dialogue are attributed to him as if 
he were their inventor. It is not Sir Harry, or old Dornton, 
or Dubster, who said this or that; but "Lewis," " Munden," 
or " Keeley." They seem to think the wit really originated 
with the man who uttered it so delightfully. 

Critical playgoing is very inferior in its enjoyments to this. 
It must of necessity blame as well as praise; it becomes diffi- 



122 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

cult to please ; it is tempted to prove its own merits, instead 
of those of its entertainers; and the enjoyments of self-love, 
besides, perhaps, being ill-founded, and subjecting it to the 
blame which it bestows, are sorry substitutes, at the best, for 
hearty delight in others. Never, after I had taken critical 
pen in hand, did I pass the thoroughly delightful evenings at 
the playhouse which I had done when I went only to laugh 
or be moved. I had the pleasure, it is true, of praising those 
whom I admired; but the retributive uneasiness of the very 
pleasure of blaming attended it ; the consciousness of self, 
which on all occasions except loving ones contains a bitter 
in its sweet, put its sorry obstacle in the way of an unem- 
barrassed delight; and I found the days flown when I 
retained none but the good passages of plays and performers, 
and when I used to carry to my old school-fellows rapturous 
accounts of the farces of Colman, and the good-natured come- 
dies of O'Keefe. 

I speak of my own feelings, and at a particular time of life: 
but forty or fifty years ago people of all times of life were 
much greater playgoers than they are now. They dined 
earlier, they had not so many newspapers, clubs, and piano- 
fortes; the French Revolution only tended at first to endear 
the nation to its own habits ; it had not yet opened a thousand 
new channels of thought and interest ; nor had railroads con- 
spired to carry people, bodily as well as mentally, into as 
many analogous directions. Everything was more concen- 
trated, and the various classes of society felt a greater concern 
in the same amusements. Nobility, gentry, citizens, princes, 
— all were frequenters of theatres, and even more or less 
acquainted personally with the performers. Nobility inter- 
married with them ; gentry, and citizens too, wrote for them ; 
princes conversed and lived with them. Sheridan, and other 
members of Parliament, were managers as well as dramatists. 
It was Lords Derby, Craven, and Thurlow that sought wives 
on the stage. Two of the most popular minor dramatists 
were Cobb, a clerk in the India House, and Birch, the 
pastrycook. If Mrs. Jordan lived with the Duke of Clarence 
(William IV.) as his mistress, nobody doubts that she was as 
faithful to him as a wife. His brother, the Prince of Wales 
(George the Fourth), besides his intimacy with Sheridan and 
the younger Colman, and to say nothing of Mrs. Eobinson, 
took a pleasure in conversing with Kemble, and was the per- 
sonal patron of O'Keefe and of Kelly. The Kembles, indeed, 






PLAYGOINa AND VOLUNTEERS. 123 

as Garrick had been, were received everywhere among the truly 
best circles ; that is to say, where intelligence was combined 
with high breeding; and they deserved it : for whatever 
difference of opinion may be entertained as to the amount of 
genius in the family, nobody who recollects them will dispute 
that they were a remarkable race, dignified and elegant in 
manners, with intellectual tendencies, and in point of aspect 
very like what has been called " God Almighty's nobility." 

I remember once standing behind John Kemble and a 
noble lord at a sale. It was the celebrated book sale of the 
Duke of Roxburgh; and by the same token I recollect 
another person that was present, of whom more by-and-by. 
The player and the nobleman were conversing, the former in 
his high, dignified tones, the latter in a voice which I heard 
but indistinctly. Presently, the actor turned his noble profile to 
his interlocutor, and on his moving it back again, the man of 
quality turned his. What a difference ! and what a voice ! 
Kemble's voice was none of the best ; but, like his profile, it 
was nobleness itself compared with that of the noble lord. I 
had taken his lordship for a young man, by the trim cut of 
his body and of his clothes, the " fall in" of his back, and the 
smart way in which he had stuck his hat on the top of his 
head ; but when I saw his profile and heard his voice, I 
seemed to have before me a premature old one. His mouth 
seemed toothless; his voice was a hasty mumble. Without 
being aquiline, the face had the appearance of being what 
may be called an old " nose-and-mouth face." The sudden- 
ness with which it spoke added to the surprise. It was like 
a flash of decrepitude on the top of a young body. 

This was the sale at which the unique copy of Boccaccio 
fetched a thousand and four hundred pounds. It was bought 
by the Marquis of Blandford (the late Duke of Marlborough) 
in competition with Earl Spencer, who conferred with his son, 
Lord Althorp, and gave it up. So at least I understand, for 
I was not aware of the conference, or of the presence of Lord 
Althorp (afterwards minister, and late Earl Spencer). I 
remember his father well at the sale, and how he sat at the 
farther end of the auctioneer's table, with an air of intelligent 
indifference, leaning his head on his hand so as to push up 
the hat a little from off it. I beheld with pleasure in his 
person the pupil of Sir William Jones and brother of Cole- 
ridge's Duchess of Devonshire. It was curious, and scarcely 
pleasant, to see two Spencers thus bidding against one another, 



124 ATJTOBIOaEAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. 

even though the bone of contention was a book; and the ghost 
of their illustrious kinsman, the author of the Faerie Queene, 
might have been gratified to see what book it was, and how 
high the prices of old folios had risen. What satisfaction the 
Marquis got out of his victory I cannot say. The Earl, who, 
I believe, was a genuine lover of books, could go home and 
reconcile himself to his defeat by reading the work in a 
cheaper edition. 

I shall have occasion to speak of Mr. Kemble again pre- 
sently, and of subsequent actors by-and-by. 



CHAPTER VII. 
ESSAYS Iff CRITICISM. 



I had not been as misdirected in the study of prose as in that 
of poetry. It was many years before I discovered what was 
requisite in the latter. In the former, the very commonplaces 
of the schoolmaster tended to put me in the right path, for 
(as I have already intimated) he found the Spectator in vogue, 
and this became our standard of prose writing. 

It is true (as I have also mentioned) that in consequence of 
the way in which we were taught to use them by the school- 
master, I had become far more disgusted than delighted with 
the charming papers of Addison, and with the exaction of 
moral observations on a given subject. But the seed was 
sown, to ripen under pleasanter circumstances ; and my 
father, with his usual good-natured impulse, making me a 
present one day of a set of the British classics, which attracted 
my eyes on the shelves of Harley, the bookseller in Cavendish 
Street, the tenderness with which I had come to regard all 
my school recollections, and the acquaintance which I now 
made for the first time with the lively papers of the Con- 
noisseur, gave me an entirely fresh and delightful sense of the 
merits of essay-writing. I began to think that when Boyer 
crumpled up and chucked away my " themes" in a passion, 
he had not done justice to the honest weariness of my anti- 
formalities, and to their occasional evidences of something 
better. 

The consequence was a delighted perusal of the whole set 
of classics (for I have ever been a " glutton of books ") ; and 
this was followed by my first prose endeavours in a series of 



ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 125 

papers called the Traveller, which appeared in the evening 
paper of that name [long since incorporated with the Globe], 
tinder the signature of " Mr. Town, junior, Critic and Censor- 
general" — the senior Mr. Town, with the same titles, being 
no less a person than my friend of the Connoisseur, with 
whom I thus had the boldness to fraternize. I offered 
them with fear and trembling to the editor of the Traveller, 
Mr. Quin, and was astonished at the gaiety with which he 
accepted them. What astonished me more was a perquisite 
of five or six copies of the paper, which I enjoyed every 
Saturday when my essays appeared, and with which I used 
to reissue from Bolt Court in a state of transport. I had 
been told, but could not easily conceive, that the editor of a 
new evening paper would be happy to fill up his pages with 
any decent writing ; but Mr. Quin praised me besides; and I 
could not behold the long columns of type, written by myself, 
in a public paper, without thinking there must be some 
merit in them, besides that of being a stop-gap. 

Luckily, the essays were little read ; they were not at all 
noticed in public ; and I thus escaped the perils of another 
premature laudation for my juvenility- I was not led to 
repose on the final merits either of my prototype or his 
imitator. The Connoisseur, nevertheless, gave me all the 
transports of a first love. His citizen at Vauxhall, who says, 
at every mouthful of beef, " There goes twopence;" and the 
creed of his unbeliever, who "believes in all unbelief," com- 
peted for a long time in my mind with the humour of Gold- 
smith. I was also greatly delighted with the singular 
account of himself, in the dual number, with which he con- 
cludes his work, shadowing forth the two authors of it in one 
person: — 

" Mr. Town" (says he) "is a fair, black, middle-sized, very short 
person. He wears his own hair, and a periwig. He is about thirty 
years of age, and not more than four-and-twenty. He is a student of 
the law and a bachelor of physic. He was bred at the University of 
Oxford; where, having taken no less than three degrees, he looks 
down on many learned professors as his inferiors ; yet, having been 
there but little longer than to take the first degree of bachelor ot 
arts, it has more than once happened that the censor-general of all 
England has been reprimanded by the censor of his college for 
neglecting to furnish the usual essay, or (in the collegiate phrase) 
the theme of the week." 

Probably these associations with school-terms, and with a 
juvenile time of life, gave me an additional liking for the 



126 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Connoisseur. The twofold author, which he thus describes 
himself, consisted of Bonnell Thornton, afterwards the trans- 
lator of Plautus, and Colman, the dramatist, author of the 
Jealous Wife, and translator of Terence. Colman was the 
" very short person " of four-and-twenty, and Thornton was 
the bachelor of physic, though he never practised. The 
humour of these writers, compared with Goldsmith's, was 
caricature, and not deep; they had no pretensions to the 
genius of the Vicar of Wakefield: but they possessed great 
animal spirits, which are a sort of merit in this climate ; and 
this was another claim on my regard. The name of Bonnell 
Thornton (whom I had taken to be the sole author of the 
Connoisseur) was for a long time, with me, another term for 
animal spirits, humour, and wit. I then discovered that 
there was more smartness in him than depth; and had I 
known that he and Colman had ridiculed the odes of Gray, 
I should, perhaps, have made the discovery sooner ; though I 
w r as by no means inclined to confound parody with disrespect. 
But the poetry of Gray had been one of my first loves ; and 
I could as soon have thought of friendship or of the grave 
with levity, as of the friend of West, and the author of the 
Elegy and the Bard. 

An amusing story is told of Thornton, which may show 
the quick and ingenious, but, perhaps, not very feeling turn 
of his mind. It is said that he was once discovered by his 
father sitting in a box at the theatre, when he ought to have 
been in his rooms at college. The old gentleman addressing 
him accordingly, that youngster turned in pretended amaze- 
ment to the people about him, and said, " Smoke old wigsby, 
who takes me for his son." Thornton, senior, upon this, 
indignantly hastens out of the box, with the manifest inten- 
tion of setting off for Oxford, and finding the rooms vacant. 
Thornton, junior, takes double post-horses, and is there 
before him, quietly sitting in his chair. He rises from it on 
his father's appearance, and cries, " Ah ! dear sir, is it you ? 
To what am I indebted for this unexpected pleasure ? " 

Goldsmith enchanted me. I knew no end of repeating 
passages out of the Essays and the Citizen of the World — 
such as the account of the Club, with its Babel of talk ; of 
Beau Tibbs, with his dinner of ox-cheek which " his grace 
w r as so fond of ; " and of the wooden-legged sailor, who 
regarded those that were lucky enough to have their " legs 
shot off" on board king's ships (which entitled them to a 



ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 127 

penny a day), as being " born with, golden spoons in their 
mouths." Then there was his eorrect, sweet style; the 
village-painting in his poems ; the Retaliation, which, though 
on an artificial subject, seemed to me (as it yet seems) a still 
more genuine effusion ; and, above all, the Vicar of Wakefield 
— with Burchell, whom I adored ; and Moses, whom I would 
rather have been cheated with, than prosper; and the Vicar 
himself in his cassock, now presenting his " Treatise against 
Polygamy " (in the family picture) to his wife, habited as 
Yenus ; and now distracted for the loss of his daughter Olivia, 
who is seduced by the villanous squire. I knew not whether 
to laugh at him, or cry with him most. 

These, with Fielding and Smollett, Voltaire, Charlotte 
Smith, Bage, Mrs. Eadcliffe, and Augustus La Fontaine, 
were my favourite prose authors. I had subscribed, while at 
school, to the famous circulating library in Leadenhall Street, 
and I have continued to be such a glutton of novels ever 
since, that, except where they repel me in the outset with 
excessive wordiness, I can read their three-volume enormities 
to this day without skipping a syllable ; though I guess pretty 
nearly all that is going to happen, from the mysterious gen- 
tleman who opens the work in the dress of a particular cen- 
tury, down to the distribution of punishments and the drying 
up of tears in the last chapter. I think the authors wonder- 
fully clever people, particularly those who write most ; and I 
should like the most contemptuous of their critics to try their 
hands at doing something half as engaging. 

Should any chance observer of these pages (for I look upon 
my customary perusers as people of deeper insight) pro- 
nounce such a course of reading frivolous, he will be exaspe- 
rated to hear that, had it not been for reverence to opinion, 
I should have been much inclined at that age (as, indeed, I 
am still) to pronounce the reading of far graver works frivo- 
lous ; history, for one. I read every history that came in my 
way, and could not help liking good old Herodotus, ditto 
Villani, picturesque, festive Froissart, and accurate and most 
entertaining, though artificial, Gibbon. But the contradic- 
tions of historians in general, their assumption of a dignity 
for which I saw no particular grounds, their unphilosophic 
and ridiculous avoidance (on that score) of personal anecdote, 
and, above all, the narrow-minded and time-serving con- 
finement of their subjects to wars and party -government (for 
there are time-servings, as there are fashions, that last for 



128 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

centuries), instinctively repelled me. I felt, though I did not 
know, till Fielding told me, that there was more truth in the 
verisimilitudes of fiction than in the assumptions of history ; 
and I rejoiced over the story told of Sir Walter Raleigh, who, 
on receiving I forget how many different accounts of an incident 
that occurred under his own windows, laughed at the idea of 
his writing a History of the World. 

But the writer who made the greatest impression on me 
was Voltaire. I did not read French at that time, but I fell 
in with the best translation of some of his miscellaneous 
works; and I found in him not only the original of much 
which I had admired in the style and pleasantry of my 
favourite native authors, Goldsmith in particular (who adored 
him), but the most formidable antagonist of absurdities which 
the world had seen ; a discloser of lights the most overwhelm- 
ing, in flashes of wit ; a destroyer of the strongholds of super- 
stition, that were never to be built up again, let the hour 
of renovation seem to look forth again as it might. I was 
transported with the gay courage and unquestionable huma- 
nity of this extraordinary person, and I soon caught the tone 
of his cunning implications and provoking turns. He did 
not frighten me. I never felt for a moment, young as I was, 
and Christianly brought up, that true religion would suffer 
at his hands. On the contrary, I had been bred up (in 
my home circle) to look for reforms in religion : I had been 
led to desire the best and gentlest form of it, unattended with 
threats and horrors: and if the school orthodoxy did not 
countenance such expectations, it took no pains to discounte- 
nance them. I had privately accustomed myself, of my own 
further motion, to doubt and to reject every doctrine, and 
every statement of facts, that went counter to the plainest 
precepts of love, and to the final happiness of all the creatures 
of God. I could never see, otherwise, what Christianity 
\ could mean, that was not meant by a hundred inferior reli- 
\ gions ; nor could I think it right and holy to accept of the 
' greatest hopes, apart from that universality — Fiat justitia, 
mat cozlum. I was prepared to give up heaven itself (as far 
as it is possible for human hope to do so) rather than that 
anything so unheavenly as a single exclusion from it should 
exist. Therefore, to me, Voltaire was a putter down of a 
great deal that was wrong, but of nothing that was right. 
I did not take him for a builder; neither did I feel that 
he knew much of the sanctuary which was inclosed in what 



ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 129 

be pulled down. He found a heap of rubbish pretending to 
be the shrine itself, and he set about denying its pretensions 
and abating it as a nuisance, without knowing, or considering 
(at least I thought so) what there remained of beauty and 
durability, to be disclosed on its demolition. I fought for 
him, then and afterwards, with those who challenged me to 
the combat; and I was for some time driven to take myself 
for a Deist in the most ordinary sense of the word, till I had 
learned to know what a Christian truly was, and so arrived 
at opinions on religious matters in general which I shall 
notice at the conclusion of these volumes. 

It is a curious circumstance respecting the books of Vol- 
taire — the greatest writer upon the whole that France has 
produced, and undoubtedly the greatest name in the eighteenth 
century — that to this moment they are far less known in 
England than talked of; so much so, that, with the exception 
of a few educated circles, chiefly of the upper class, and ex- 
clusively among the men even in those, he has not only been 
hardly read at all, even by such as have talked of him with 
admiration, or loaded him with reproach, but the portions of 
his writings that have had the greatest effect on the world are 
the least known among readers the most popularly acquainted 
with him. The reasons of this remarkable ignorance respect- 
ing so great a neighbour — one of the movers of the world, 
and an especial admirer of England — are to be found, first, in 
the exclusive and timid spirit, under the guise of strength, 
which came up with the accession of George the Third; 
second, as a consequence of this spirit, a studious ignoring of 
the Frenchman in almost all places of education, the colleges 
and foundations in particular ; third, the anti-Gallican spirit 
which followed and exasperated the prejudice against the 
French Revolution; and fourth, the very translation and 
popularity of two of his novels, the Candide and Zadig, 
which, though by no means among his finest productions, 
had yet enough wit and peculiarity to be accepted as sufficing 
specimens of him, even by his admirers. Unfortunately one 
of these, the Candide, contained some of his most licentious 
and even revolting writing. This enabled his enemies to 
adduce it as a sufficing specimen on their own side of the 
question; and the idea of him which they succeeded in im- 
posing upon the English community in general was that of 
a mere irreligious scoffer, who was opposed to everything 
good and serious, and who did but mingle a little frivolous 





130 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

wit with an abundance of vexatious, hard-hearted, and dis- 
gusting effrontery. 

There is, it is true, a version, purporting to be that of his 
whole works, by Smollett, Thomas Franklin, and others, 
which is understood to have been what is called a bookseller's 
job; but I never met with it except in an old catalogue; 
and I believe it was so dull and bad, that readers instinctively 
recoiled from it as an incredible representation of anything 
lively. The probability is, that Smollett only lent his name ; 
and Franklin himself may have done as little, though the 
"translator of Sophocles" (as he styled himself) was well 
enough qualified to misrepresent any kind of genius. 

Be this as it may, I have hardly ever met, even in literary 
circles, with persons who knew anything of Voltaire, except 
through the medium of these two novels, and of later school 
editions of his two histories of Charles the Twelfth and Peter 
the Great: books which teachers of all sorts in his own 
country have been gradually compelled to admit into their 
courses of reading by national pride and the imperative 
growth of opinion. Voltaire is one of the three great tragic 
writers of France, and excels in pathos; yet not one English- 
man in a thonsand knows a syllable of his tragedies, or would 
do anything but stare to hear of his pathos. Voltaire inducted 
his countrymen into a knowledge of English science and meta- 
physics, nay, even of English poetry ; }^et Englishmen have 
been told little about him in connection with them, except of 
his disagreements with Shakspeare. Voltaire created a fashion 
for English thinking, manner, and policy, and fell in love with 
the simplicity and truthfulness of their very Quakers; and 
yet, I will venture to say, the English knew far less of all this 
than they do of a licentious poem with which he degraded his 
better nature in burlesquing the history of Joan of Arc. 

There are, it is admitted, two sides to the character of 
Voltaire ; one licentious, merely scoffing, saddening, defective 
in sentiment, and therefore wanting the inner clue of the 
beautiful to guide him out of the labyrinth of scorn and per- 
plexity; all owing, be it observed, to the errors which he 
found prevailing in his youth, and to the impossible demands 
which they made on his acquiescence ; but the other side 
of his character is moral, cheerful, beneficent, prepared to 
encounter peril, nay, actually encountering it, in the only true 
Christian causes, those of toleration and charity, and raising 
that voice of demand for the advancement of reason and 



ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 131 

justice which is now growing into the whole voice of Europe. 
He was the only man perhaps that ever existed who repre- 
sented in his single person the entire character, with one 
honourable exception (for he Was never sanguinary), of the 
nation in which he was born ; nay, of its whole history, 
past, present, and to come. He had the licentiousness of 
the old monarchy under which he was bred, the cosmopolite 
ardour of the Eevolution, the science of the Consulate and the 
"savans," the unphilosophic love of glory of the Empire, 
the worldly wisdom (without pushing it into folly) of Louis 
Philippe, and the changeful humours, the firmness, the 
weakness, the flourishing declamation, the sympathy with 
the poor, the bonhomie, the unbounded hopes of the best 
actors in the extraordinary scenes acted before the eyes of 
Europe in these last ten years. As he himself could not 
construct as well as he could pull down, so neither do his 
countrymen, with all the goodness and greatness among them, 
appear to be less truly represented by him in that particular 
than in others ; but in pulling down he had the same vague 
desire of the best that could set up ; and when he was most 
thought to oppose Christianity itself, he only did it out of an 
impatient desire to see the law of love triumphant, and was 
only thought to be the adversary of its spirit, because his 
revilers knew nothing of it themselves. 

Voltaire, in an essay written by himself in the English 
language, has said of Milton, in a passage which would do 
honour to our best writers, that when the poet saw the Adamo 
of Andreini at Florence, he " pierced through the absurdity 
of the plot to the hidden majesty of the subject." It may 
be said of himself, that he pierced through the conventional 
majesty of a great many subjects, to the hidden absurdity of 
the plot. He laid the axe to a heap of savage abuses ; pulled 
the corner-stones out of dungeons and inquisitions ; bowed 
and mocked the most tyrannical absurdities out of counte- 
nance ; and raised one prodigious peal of laughter at super- 
stition, from Naples to the Baltic. He was the first man who 
got the power of opinion and common sense openly recognized 
as a reigning authority ; and who made the acknowledgment 
of it a point of wit and cunning, even with those who had 
hitherto thought they had the world to themselves. 

An abridgment that I picked up of the Philosophical Dic- 
tionary (a translation) was for a long while my text-book, 
both for opinion and style. I was also a rreat admirer of 

9—2 



132 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. 

Hlngenu, or the Sincere Huron, and of the Essay on the Phi- 
losophy of History. In the character of the Sincere Huron I 
thought I found a resemblance to my own, as most readers do 
in those of their favourites: and this piece of self-love helped 
me to discover as much good-heartedness in Voltaire as I dis- 
cerned wit. Candide, I confess, I could not like. I enjoyed 
passages; but the laughter was not as good-humoured as 
usual ; there was a view of things in it which I never enter- 
tained then or afterwards, and into which the author had been 
led, rather in order to provoke Leibnitz, than because it was 
natural to him ; and, to crown my unwilling dislike, the book 
had a coarseness, apart from graceful and pleasurable ideas, 
which I have never been able to endure. There were pas- 
sages in the abridgment of the Philosophical Dictionary which 
I always passed over; but the rest delighted me beyond 
measure. I can repeat things out of it now. 

It must have been about the time of my first acquaintance 
with Voltaire, that I became member, for a short time, of a 
club of young men, who associated for the purpose of culti- 
vating public speaking. With the exception of myself, I be- 
lieve the whole of them were students at Jaw ; but, to the best 
of my recollection, the subjects they discussed were as miscel- 
laneous as if they were of no profession ; though the case pro- 
bably became otherwise, as their powers advanced. At all 
events I did not continue long with them, my entrance into 
the club having mainly originated in a wish to please my 
friend Barron Field, and public speaking not being one of my 
objects in life. It might have been much to my benefit if it 
had ; for it would in all probability have sooner rid me of 
my stammering, and delivered me from my fear of it among 
strangers and in the presence of assembled audiences ; — an 
anxiety, of which I have never been able to get rid, and which 
has deprived me of serious advantages. Far different was the 
case with another member of the club, Thomas Wilde, then 
an attorney in Castle Street, Falcon Square, afterwards Lord 
Chancellor, and a peer of the realm. Wilde had an impedi- 
ment in his speech, which he inflexibly determined to mend : 
an underhung jaw and a grave and fixed expression of coun- 
tenance seemed constantly to picture this resolution to me, as 
I beheld him. The world has seen how well he succeeded. 
Another member of the club, who had no such obstacle to I 
surmount, but who might have been diverted from success by 
wider intellectual sympathies and the very pleasurableness oi 



ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. loo 

his nature, conquered those perils by an energy still more ad- 
mirable, and is the present Lord Chief Baron Pollock. My 
friend Field himself, though suffering under a state of health 
which prevented his growing old, became a judge in the 
colonies ; and very likely I should have more honours of the 
club to refer to, had I known it longer. I can with truth 
aver, that however much I admired the energy of Wilde, and 
have more than admired that of the Chief Baron (of whose 
legal as well as general knowledge, the former, if I am not 
mistaken, was in the habit of taking friendly counsel to the 
last), my feelings toward them, as far as ambition was con- 
cerned, never degenerated into envy. My path was chosen 
before I knew them ; my entire inclinations were in it ; and 
I never in my life had any personal ambition whatsoever, but 
that of adding to the list of authors, and doing some good as 
a cosmopolite. Often, it is true, when I considered my family, 
have I wished that the case could have been otherwise, and 
the cosmopolitism still not ineffectual ; nor do I mean to cast 
the slightest reflection on the views, personal or otherwise, of 
the many admirable and estimable men who have adorned the 
bench in our courts of law. My reverence, indeed, for the 
character of the British judge, notwithstanding a few mon- 
strous exceptions in former times, and one or two subse- 
quently of a very minor kind, is of so deep a nature, that I 
can never disassociate the feeling from their persons, however 
social and familiar it may please the most amiable of them to 
be in private. I respected as well as loved my dear friend 
Talfourd more and more to the last ; entertain the like sen- 
timents for others, of whose acquaintance, while living, it 
would not become me openly to boast ; and believe it would 
have been impossible for them to have done better or more 
nobly for the world as well as for themselves, than by obey- 
ing the inclination which took them where they ascended. 
Under these circumstances, it will be considered, I trust, neither 
indecorous nor invidious in me, if I close these legal remini- 
scences with relating, that having, when I was young, been 
solemnly rebuked one evening in company by a subsequently 
eminent person of my own age, now dead, and of no remark- 
able orthodoxy, for making what he pronounced to be an irre- 
verent remark on a disputed point of Mosaic history, I said to 

a friend of mine on coming away, " Now mark me, B , so 

and so (naming him) will go straight up the high road to prefer- 
ment, while I shall as surely be found in the opposite direction." 



134 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 



Besides Voltaire and the Connoisseur, I was very fond at 
that time of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and a great reader of 
Pope. My admiration of the Bape of the Lock led me to 
write a long mock-heroic poem, entitled the Battle of the 
Bridal Ring, the subject of which was a contest between two 
rival orders of spirits, on whom to bestow a lady in marriage. 
I venture to say, that it would have been well spoken of by 
the critics, and was not worth a penny. I recollect one couplet, 
which will serve to show how I mimicked the tone of my 
author. It was an apostrophe to Mantua, — 

" Mantua, of great and small the long renown, 
That now a Virgil giv'st, and now a gown." 

Dryden, I read, too, but not with that relish for his nobler 
versification which I afterwards acquired. To dramatic read- 
ing, with all my love of the theatre, I have already mentioned 
my disinclination ; yet, in the interval of my departure from 
school, and my getting out of my teens, I wrote two farces, a 
comedy, and a tragedy ; and the plots of all (such as they 
were) were inventions. The -hero of my tragedy was the Earl 
of Surrey (Howard, the poet), who was put to death by Henry 
the Eighth. I forget what the comedy was upon. The title 
of one of the farces was the Beau Miser, which may explain 
the nature of it. The other was called A Hundred a Year, 
and turned upon a hater of the country, who, upon having an 
annuity to that amount given him, on condition of his never 
going out of London, becomes a hater of the town. In the 
last scene, his annuity died a jovial death in a country tavern; 
the bestower entering the room just as my hero had got on a 
table, with a glass in his hand, to drink confusion to the me- 
tropolis. All these pieces were, I doubt not, as bad as need 
be. About thirty years ago, being sleepless one night with a 
fit of enthusiasm, in consequence of reading about the Spanish 
play of the Cid, in Lord Holland's Life of Guillen de Castro, 
I determined to write a tragedy on the same subject, which 
was accepted at Drury Lane. Perhaps the conduct of this 
piece was not without merit, the conclusion of each act throw- 
ing the interest into the succeeding one : but I had great 
doubts of all the rest of it ; and on receiving it from Mr. 
Elliston to make an alteration in the third act, very judi- 
ciously proposed bj him, I looked the whole of the play over 
again, and convinced myself it was unfit for the stage. I 
therefore withheld it. I had painted my hero too after the 
"beau-ideal of a modern reformer, instead of the half-godlike, 



ESSAYS EST CRITICISM. 135 

half-bigoted soldier that he was. I began afterwards to re- 
cast the play, but grew tired and gave it up. The Cid would 
make a delicious character for the stage, or in any work; not, 
indeed, as Corneille declaimed him, nor as inferior writers 
might adapt him to the reigning taste ; but taken, I mean, as 
he was, with the noble impulses he received from nature, the 
drawbacks with which a bigoted age qualified them, and the 
social and open-hearted pleasantry (not the least evidence of his 
nobleness) which brings forth his heart, as it were, in flashes 
through the stern armour. But this would require a strong 
hand, and readers capable of grappling with it. In the mean- 
time, they should read of him in Mr. South ey's Chronicle of 
the Cid (an admirable summary from the old Spanish writers), 
and in the delightful verses at the end of it, translated from 
an old Spanish poem by Mr. Hookham Frere, with a trium- 
phant force and fidelity, that you feel to be true to the original 
at once. 

About the period of my writing the above essays, circum- 
stances introduced me to the acquaintance of Mr. Bell, the 
proprietor of the Weekly Messenger. In his house in the 
Strand I used to hear of politics and dramatic criticism, and 
of the persons who wrote them. Mr. Bell had been well 
known as a bookseller, and a speculator in elegant typo- 
graphy. It is to him the public are indebted for the small 
edition of the Poets that preceded Cooke's, and which, with 
all my predilections for that work, was unquestionably supe- 
rior to it. Besides, it included Chaucer and Spenser. The 
omission of these in Cooke's edition was as unpoetical a sign 
of the times, as the present familiarity with their names is the 
reverse. It was thought a mark of good sense : — as if good 
sense, in matters of literature, did not consist as much in 
knowing what was poetical poetry, as brilliant in wit. Bell 
was upon the whole a remarkable person. He was a plain 
man, with a red face, and a nose exaggerated by intem- 
perance ; and yet there was something not unpleasing in his 
countenance, especially when he spoke. He had sparkling 
black eyes, a good-natured smile, gentlemanly manners, and 
one of the most agreeable voices I ever heard. He had no 
acquirements, perhaps not even grammar; but his taste in 
putting forth a publication, and getting the best artists to 
adorn it, was new in those times, and may be admired in any ; 
and the same taste was observable in his house. He knew 
nothing of poetry. He thought the Delia Cruscans fine 



136 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

people, because they were known in the circles ; and for Mil- 
ton's Paradise Lost he had the same epithet as for Mrs. 
Crouch's face, or the phaeton of Major Topharn : he thought 
it " pretty." Yet a certain liberal instinct, and turn for large 
dealing, made him include Chaucer and Spenser in his edition ; 
he got Stothard to adorn the one, and Mortimer the other ; 
and in the midst, I suspect, of very equivocal returns, issued a 
British Theatre with embellishments, and a similar edition of 
the plays of Shakspeare — the incorrectest publication, accord- 
ing to Mr. Chalmers, that ever issued from the press. 

Unfortunately for Mr. Bell, he had as great a taste for neat 
wines and ankles as for pretty books ; and, to crown his 
misfortunes, the Prince of Wales, to whom he was bookseller, 
once did him the honour to partake of an entertainment, or 
refreshment (I forget which, most probably the latter), at his 
house. He afterwards became a bankrupt. He was one of 
those men whose temperament and turn for enjoyment throw 
( a sort of grace over whatsoever they do, standing them in 
stead of everything but prudence, and sometimes even sup- 
plying them with the consolations which imprudence has 
forfeited. After his bankruptcy he set up a newspaper, 
which became profitable to everybody but himself. He had 
become so used to lawyers and bailiffs, that the more his 
concerns flourished, the more his debts flourished with him. 
It seemed as if he would have been too happy without them ; 
too exempt from the cares that beset the prudent. The first 
time I saw him he was standing in a chemist's shop, waiting 
till the road was clear for him to issue forth. He had a 
toothache, for which he held a handkerchief over his mouth ; 
and, while he kept a sharp look-out with his bright eye, was 
alternately groaning in a most gentlemanly manner over his 
gums, and addressing some polite words to the shopman. I 
had not then been introduced to him, and did not know his 
person ; so that the effect of his voice upon me was unequi- 
vocal. I liked him for it, and wished the bailiff at the devil.* 

* An intelligent compositor (Mr. J. P. S. Bicknell), who has been 
a noter of curious passages in his time, informs me, that Bell was the 
first printer who confined the small letter s to its present shape, and 
rejected altogether the older form, J. He tells me, that this inno- 
vation, besides the handsomer form of the new letter, was " a boon to 
both master-printers and the compositor, inasmuch as it lessened the 
amount of capital necessary to be laid out under the old system, and 
saved to the workman no small portion of his valuable time and labour." 

My informant adds, as a curious instance of conservative tendency 



ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 137 

In the office of the Weekly Messenger, I saw one day a 
person who looked the epitome of squalid authorship. He 
was wretchedly dressed and dirty; and the rain, as he took 
his hat off, came away from it as from a spout. This was a 
man of the name of Badini, who had been poet at the Opera, 
and was then editor of the Messenger. He was afterwards 
sent out of the country under the Alien Act, and became 
reader of the English papers to Bonaparte. His intimacy 
with some of the first families in the country, among whom 
he had been a teacher, is supposed to have been of use to the 
French Government. He wrote a good idiomatic English 
style, and was a man of abilities. I had never before seen a 
poor author, such as are described in books; and the spectacle 
of the reality startled me. Like most authors, however, who 
are at once very poor and very clever, his poverty was his 
own fault. When he received any money he disappeared, 
and was understood to spend it in alehouses. We heard that 
in Paris he kept his carriage. I have since met with authors 
of the same squalid description ; but they were destitute of 
ability, and had no more right to profess literature as a trade 
than alchemy. It is from these that the common notions 
about the poverty of the tribe are taken. One of them, poor 
fellow ! might have cut a figure in Smollett. He was a 
proper ideal author, in rusty black, out at elbows, thin and 
pale. He brought me an ode about an eagle ; for which the 
publisher of a magazine, he said, had had " the inhumanity" 
to offer him half-a-crown. His necessity for money he did 
not deny ; but his great anxiety was to know whether, as a 
poetical composition, his ode was not worth more. " Is that 
poetry, sir ? " cried he : " that's what I want to know — is 
that poetry ? " rising from his chair, and staring and trembling 
in all the agony of contested excellence. 

My brother John, at the beginning of the year 1805, set 

on small points, that Messrs. Rivington having got as far as three 
sheets, on a work of a late Bishop of Durham, in which the new plan 
was adopted, the Bishop sent back the sheets, in order to have the 
old letter restored, which compelled the booksellers to get a new 
supply from the type-foundry, the fount containing the venerable f 
having been thrown away. 

Mr. Bicknell also informs me, that when Bell set up his news- 
paper, the Weekly Messenger (which had a wood-cut at the top of it, 
of a newsman blowing his horn), he is said to have gone to a masque- 
rade in the newsman's character, and distributed prospectuses to the 
company. 



138 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Tip a paper, called the News, and I went to live with him in 
Brjdges Street, and write the theatricals in it. 

[Between quitting the Bluecoat School, and the establish- 
ment of the Neivs, Leigh Hunt had been for some time in the 
law office of his brother Stephen.] 

It was the custom at that time for editors of papers to be 
intimate with actors and dramatists. They were often pro- 
prietors, as well as editors ; and, in that case, it was not 
expected that they should escape the usual intercourse, or 
wish to do so. It was thought a feather in the cap of all 
parties ; and with their feathers they tickled one another. 
The newspaper man had consequence in the green-room, and 
plenty of tickets for his friends; and he dined at amusing 
tables. The dramatist secured a good-natured critique in his 
journal, sometimes got it written himself, or, according to 
Mr. Eeynolds, was even himself the author of it. The actor, 
if he was of any evidence, stood upon the same ground of 
reciprocity; and not to know a pretty actress would have 
been a want of the knowing in general. Upon new performers, 
and upon writers not yet introduced, a journalist was more 
impartial ; and sometimes, where the proprietor was in one 
interest more than another, or for some personal reason grew 
offended with an actor, or set of actors, a criticism would 
occasionally be hostile, and even severe. An editor, too, 
would now and then suggest to his employer the policy of 
exercising a freer authority, and obtain influence enough with 
him to show symptoms of it. I believe Bell's editor, who 
was more clever, was also more impartial than most critics ; 
though the publisher of the British Theatre, and patron of the 
Delia Cruscans, must have been hampered with literary inti- 
macies. The best chance for an editor, who wished to have any- 
thing like an opinion of his own, was the appearance of a rival 
newspaper with a strong theatrical connection. Influence 
was here threatened with diminution. It was to be held up 
on other grounds ; and the critic was permitted to find out 
that a bad play was not good, or an actress's petticoat of the 
lawful dimensions. 

Puffing and plenty of tickets were, however, the system of 
the day. It was an interchange of amenities over the dinner- 
table ; a flattery of power on the one side, and puns on the 
other ; and what the public took for a criticism on a play 
was a draft upon the box-office, or reminiscences of last 
Thursday's salmon and lobster-sauce. The custom was, to 



ESSAYS IN CBITICISM. 139 

write as short and as favourable a paragraph on the new 
piece as could be; to say that Bannister was " excellent" and 
Mrs, Jordan "charming;" to notice the " crowded house" or 
invent it, if necessary; and to conclude by observing that 
a the whole went off with eclat" For the rest, it was a 
critical religion in those times to admire Mr. Kemble: and at 
the period in question Master Betty had appeared, and been 
hugged to the hearts of the town as the young Eoscius. 

We saw that independence in theatrical criticism would be 
a great novelty. We announced it, and nobody believed us ; 
we stuck to it, and the town believed everything we said. 
The proprietors of the News, of whom I knew so little that I 
cannot recollect with certainty any one of them, very hand- 
somely left me to myself. My retired and scholastic habits 
kept me so; and the pride of success confirmed my inde- 
pendence with regard to others. I was then in my twentieth 
year, an early age at that time for a writer. The usual 
exaggeration of report made me younger than I was : and 
after being a "young Eoscius" political, I was now looked 
upon as one critical. To know an actor personally appeared 
to me a vice not to be thought of; and I would as lief have 
taken poison as accepted a ticket from the theatres. 

Good God ! To think of the grand opinion I had of 
myself in those days, and what little reason I had for it! 
Not to accept the tickets was very proper, considering that I 
bestowed more blame than praise. There was also more 
good-nature than I supposed in not allowing myself to know 
any actors ; but the vanity of my position had greater weight 
with me than anything else, and I must have proved it to 
discerning eyes by the small quantity of information I 
brought to my task, and the ostentation with which I pro- 
duced it. I knew almost as little of the drama as the young 
Eoscius himself. Luckily, I had the advantage of him in 
knowing how unfit he was for his office ; and, probably, he 
thought me as much so, though he could not have argued 
upon it ; for I was in the minority respecting his merits, and 
the balance was then trembling on the beam; the News, I 
believe, hastened the settlement of the question. I wish with 
all my heart we had let him alone, and he had got a little 
more money. However, he obtained enough to create him 
a provision for life. His position, which appeared so brilliant 
at first, had a remarkable cruelty in it. Most men begin life 
with struggles, and have their vanity sufficiently knocked 



140 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUOT. 

about the head and shoulders to make their kinder fortunes 
the more welcome. Mr. Betty had his sugar first, and his 
physic afterwards. He began life with a double childhood, 
with a new and extraordinary felicity added to the natural 
enjoyments of his age; and he lived to see it speedily come 
to nothing, and to be taken for an ordinary person. I am 
told that he acquiesces in his fate, and agrees that the town 
were mistaken. If so, he is no ordinary person still, and has 
as much right to our respect for his good sense, as he is de- 
clared on all hands to deserve it for his amiableness. I have 
an anecdote of him to both purposes, which exhibits him in 
a very agreeable light. Hazlitt happened to be at a party 
where Mr. Betty was present; and in coming away, when 
they were all putting on their great-coats, the critic thought 
fit to compliment the dethroned favourite of the town, by 
telling him that he recollected him in old times, and had 
been " much pleased with him." Betty looked at his me- 
morialist, as much as to say, " You don't tell me so!" and 
then starting into a tragical attitude, exclaimed, " Oh, memory! 
memory !" 

I was right about Master Betty, and I am sorry for it ; though 
the town was in fault, not he. I think I was right also about 
Kemble ; but I have no regret upon that score. He flourished 
long enough after my attack on his majestic dryness and 
deliberate nothings; and Kean would have taken the public 
by storm, whether they had been prepared for him or not : 

*' One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." 

Kemble faded before him, like a tragedy ghost. I never 
denied the merits which that actor possessed. He had the 
look of a Roman ; made a very good ideal, though not a very 
real Coriolanus, for his pride was not sufficiently blunt and 
unaffected : and in parts that suited his natural deficiency, 
such as Penruddock and the Abbe de l'Epee, would have 
been altogether admirable and interesting, if you could have 
forgotten that their sensibility, in his hands, was not so much 
repressed, as wanting. He was no more to be compared to 
his sister, than stone is to flesh and blood. There was much 
of the pedagogue in him. He made a fuss about trifles ; was 
inflexible on a pedantic reading : in short, was rather a 
teacher of elocution than an actor ; and not a good teacher, 
on that account. There was a merit in his idealism, as far as 
it went. He had, at least, faith in something classical and 



ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 141 

scholastic, and he made the town partake of it; but it was all 
on the surface — a hollow trophy : and I am persuaded, that 
he had no idea in his head but of a stage Roman, and the dig- 
nity he added to his profession. 

But if I was right about Kemble, whose admirers I plagued 
enough, I was not equally so about the living dramatists, 
whom I plagued more. I laid all the deficiencies of the 
modern drama to their account, and treated them like a 
parcel of mischievous boys, of whom I was the schoolmaster 
and whipper-in. I forgot that it was I who was the boy, 
and that they knew twenty times more of the world than I 
did. Not that I mean to say their comedies were excellent, 
or that my commonplaces about the superior merits of Con- 
greve and Sheridan were not well founded; but there was 
more talent in their " five-act farce " than I supposed; and I 
mistook, in a great measure, the defect of the age — its dearth 
of dramatic character — for that of the writers who were to 
draw upon it. It is true, a great wit, by a laborious process, 
and the help of his acquirements, might extract a play or 
two from it, as was Sheridan's own case; but there was a 
great deal of imitation even in Sheridan, and he was fain to 
help himself to a little originality out of the characters of his 
less formalized countrymen, his own included. 

It is remarkable, that the three most amusing dramatists 
of the last age, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and O'Keefe, were all 
Irishmen, and all had characters of their own. Sheridan, 
after all, was Swift's Sheridan come to life again in the person 
of his grandson, with the oratory of Thomas Sheridan, the 
father, superadded and brought to bear. Goldsmith, at a 
disadvantage in his breeding, but full of address with his pen, 
drew upon his own absurdities and mistakes, and filled his 
dramas with ludicrous perplexity. O'Keefe was all for whim 
and impulse, but not without a good deal of conscience ; and, 
accordingly, in his plays we have a sort of young and pastoral 
taste of life in the very midst of its sophistications. Animal 
spirits, quips and cranks, credulity, and good intention, are 
triumphant throughout and make a delicious mixture. It is 
a great credit to O'Keefe, that he ran sometimes close upon the 
borders of the sentimental drama, and did it not only with im- 
punity but advantage ; but sprightliness and sincerity enable 
a man to do everything with advantage. 

It was a pity that as much could not be said of Mr. Col- 
man, who, after taking more licence in his writings than 



142 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

anybody, became a licenser ex officio, and seemed inclined to 
license nothing but cant. When this writer got into the 
sentimental, he made a sad business of it, for he had no faith 
in sentiment. He mouthed and overdid it, as a man does 
when he is telling a lie. At a farce he was admirable : 
and he remained so to the last, whether writing or 
licensing. 

Morton seemed to take a colour from the writers all 
round him, especially from O'Keefe and the sentimentalists. 
His sentiment was more in earnest than Colman's, yet, some- 
how, not happy either. There was a gloom in it, and a 
smack of the Old Bailey. It was best when he put it in a 
shape of humour, as in the paternal and inextinguishable 
tailorism of Old Eapid, in a Cure for the Heart-Ache. Young 
Eapid, who complains that his father " sleeps so slow," is also 
a pleasant fellow, and worthy of O'Keefe. He is one of the 
numerous crop that sprang up from Wild Oats, but not in so 
natural a soil. 

The character of the modern drama at that time was sin- 
gularly commercial : nothing but gentlemen in distress, and 
hard landlords, and generous interferers, and fathers who got 
a great deal of money, and sons who spent it. I remember 
one play in particular, in which the whole wit ran upon 
prices, bonds, and post-obits. You might know what the 
pit thought of their pound-notes by the ostentatious indif- 
ference with which the heroes of the pieces gave them away, 
and the admiration and pretended approval with which the 
spectators observed it. To make a present of a hundred 
pounds was as if a man had uprooted and given away an 
Egyptian pyramid. 

Mr. Eeynolds was not behindhand with his brother drama- 
tists in drawing upon the taste of the day for gains and dis- 
tresses. It appears by his Memoirs that he had too much 
reason for so doing. He was, perhaps, the least ambitious, 
and the least vain (whatever charges to the contrary his 
animal spirits might have brought on him) of all the writers 
of that period. In complexional vivacity he certainly did not 
yield to any of them ; his comedies, if they were fugitive, 
were genuine representations of fugitive manners, and went 
merrily to their death ; and there is one of them, the Dra- 
matist, founded upon something more lasting, which promises 
to remain in the collections, and deserves it: which is not 
a little to say of any writer. I never wish for a heartier 



ESSAYS IN CEITICISM. 143 

laugh than I have enjoyed, since I grew wiser, not only in 
seeing, but in reading the vagaries of his dramatic hero, and 
his mystifications of " Old Scratch." When I read the good- 
humoured Memoirs of this writer the other day, I felt quite 
ashamed of the ignorant and boyish way in which I used to 
sit in judgment upon his faults, without being aware of what 
was good in him ; and my repentance was increased by the 
very proper manner in which he speaks of his critics, neither 
denying the truth of their charges in letter, nor admitting 
them altogether in spirit; in fact, showing that he knew very 
well what he was about, and that they, whatsoever they fancied 
to the contrary, did not. 

Mr. Reynolds, agreeably to his sense and good-humour, 
never said a word to his critics at the time. Mr. Thomas 
Dibdin, not quite so wise, wrote me a letter, which Incledon, 
I am told, remonstrated with him for sending, saying, it would 

do him no good with the "d d boy." And he was right. 

I published it, with an answer, and only thought that I made 
dramatists " come bow to me." Mr. Colman attacked me in 
a prologue, which, by a curious chance, Fawcett spoke right 
in my teeth, the box I sat in happening to be directly oppo- 
site him. I laughed at the prologue; and only looked upon 
Mr. Colman as a great monkey pelting me with nuts, which 
I ate. Attacks of this kind were little calculated to obtain 
their end with a youth who persuaded himself that he wrote 
for nothing but the public good ; who mistook the impression 
which anybody of moderate talents can make with a news- 
paper, for the result of something peculiarly his own ; and 
who had just enough scholarship to despise the want of it 
in others. I do not pretend to think that the criticisms in 
the News had no merit at all. They showed an acquaintance 
with the style of Voltaire, Johnson, and others; were not 
unagreeably sprinkled with quotation ; and, above all, were 
written with more care and attention than was customary 
with newspapers at that time. The pains I took to round 
a period with nothing in it, or to invent a simile that should 
appear offhand, would have done honour to better stuff. 

A portion of these criticisms subsequently formed the 
appendix of an original volume on the same subject, entitled 
Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres 
[1807]. I have the book now before me: and if I thought it 
had a chance of survival I should regret and qualify a good 
deal of uninformed judgment in it respecting the art of acting, 



144 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUlsr?. 

which, with much inconsistent recommendation to the con- 
trary, it too often confounded with a literal, instead of a 
liberal imitation of nature. I particularly erred with respect 
to comedians like Munden, whose superabundance of humour 
and expression I confounded with farce and buffoonery. 
Charles Lamb taught me better. 

There was a good deal of truth, however, mixed up with 
these mistakes. One of the things on which I was always 
harping was Kemble's vicious pronunciation. Kemble had a 
smattering of learning, and a great deal of obstinacy. He 
was a reader of old books; and having discovered that pro- 
nunciation had not always been what it was, and that in one 
or two instances the older was metrically better than the 
new (as in the case of the word aches, which was originally 
a dissyllable — ditches), he took upon him to reform it in a 
variety of cases, where propriety was as much against him as 
custom. Thus the vowel e in the word " merchant," in de- 
fiance of its Latin etymology, he insisted upon pronouncing 
according to its French derivative, mar chant. "Innocent" 
he called innocint ; " conscience " (in defiance even of his 
friend Chaucer), conshince ; " virtue," in proper slip-slop, 
varchue ; " fierce," furse ; " beard," bird ; " thy," the (because 
we generally call " my/' me); and "odious," "hideous," and 
"perfidious," became ejus, hijjus, and perfijjus. 

Nor were these all. The following banter, in the shape of 
an imaginary bit of conversation between an officer and his 
friend, was, literally, no caricature : — 

A. Ha! captain! how dost? Q) The appearance would be much 
improved by a little more attention to the ( 2 ) bird. 

B. Why, so I think : there's no ( 3 ) sentimint in a bird. But then 
it serves to distinguish a soldier, and there is no doubt much military 
( 4 ) varchue in looking ( 5 ) furful. 

A. But the girls, Jack, the girls ! Why, the mouth is enough to 
banish kissing from the ( 6 ) airth ( 7 ) etairnally. 

B. In ( 8 ) maircy, no more of that ! Zounds, but the shopkeepers 
and the ( y ) mar chants will get the better of us with the dear souls ! 
However, as it is now against military law to have a tender coun- 
tenance, and as some birds, I thank heaven, are of a tolerable 
( 10 ) qual-ity, I must make a varchue of necessity; and as I can't look 
soft for the love of my girl, I must e'en look ( n ) hijjus for the love of 
my country. 

Othy; ( 2 ) beard; ( 3 ) sentiment ; ( 4 ) virtue; ( 5 ) fearful; ( 6 ) earth; 
( 7 ) eternally; ( 8 ) mercy; ( 9 ) merchants; ( 10 ) quality (with the a as 
in universality); ( u ) hideous. 



145 
CHAPTER Yin. 

SUFFERING AND REFLECTION. 

But the gay and confident spirit in which I began this 
critical career received a check, of which none of my friends 
suspected the anguish, and very few were told. I fell into a 
melancholy state of mind, produced by ill-health. 

I thought it was owing to living too well; and as I had 
great faith in temperance, I went to the reverse extreme; not 
considering that temperance implies moderation in self-denial 
as well as in self-indulgence. The consequence was a nervous 
condition, amounting to hypochondria, which lasted me several 
months. I experienced it twice afterwards, each time more 
painfully than before, and for a much longer period; but I 
have never had it since ; and I am of opinion that I need not 
have had it at all had I gone at once to a physician, and not 
repeated the mistake of being over abstinent. 

I mention the whole circumstance for the benefit of others. 
The first attack came on me with palpitations of the heart. 
These I got rid of by horseback. I forget what symptoms 
attended the approach of the second. The third was pro- 
duced by sitting out of doors too early in the spring. I 
attempted to outstarve them all, but egregiously failed. In 
one instance, I took wholly to a vegetable diet, which made 
me so weak and giddy, that I was forced to catch hold of 
rails in the streets to hinder myself from falling. In another, 
I confined myself for some weeks to a milk diet, which did 
nothing but jaundice my complexion. In the third, I took a 
modicum of meat, one glass of wine, no milk except in tea, 
and no vegetables at all ; but though I did not suffer quite so 
much mental distress from this regimen as from the milk, I 
suffered more than from the vegetables, and for a much 
longer period than with either. To be sure, I continued it 
longer ; and, perhaps, it gave me greater powers of en- 
durance ; but for upwards of four years, without intermission, 
and above six years in all, I underwent a burden of wretched- 
ness, which I afterwards felt convinced I need net have en- 
dured for as many weeks, perhaps not as many days, had I 
not absurdly taken to the extreme I spoke of in the first 
instance, and then as absurdly persisted in seeking no advice, 
partly from fear of hearing worse things foretold me, and 

10 



146 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

partly from a hope of wearing out the calamity by patience. 
At no time did my friends guess to what amount I suffered. 
They saw that my health was bad enough, and they condoled 
with me accordingly ; but cheerful habits enabled me to retain 
an air of cheerfulness, except when I was alone ; and I never 
spoke of it but once, which was to my friend Mitchell, whom 
I guessed to have undergone something of the kind. 

And what was it that I suffered? and on what account? 
On no account. On none whatsoever, except my ridiculous 
super-abstinence, and my equally ridiculous avoidance of 
speaking about it. The very fact of having no cause what- 
soever, was the thing that most frightened me. I thought 
that if I had but a cause, the cause might have been removed 
or palliated ; but to be haunted by a ghost which was not 
even ghostly, which was something I never saw, or could even 
imagine, this, I thought, was the most terrible thing that 
could befall me. I could see no end to the persecutions of an 
enemy, who was neither visible nor even existing ! 

Causes for suffering, however, came. Not, indeed, the 
worst, for I was neither culpable nor superstitious. I had 
wronged nobody ; and I now felt the inestimable benefit of 
having had cheerful opinions given me in religion. But I 
plagued myself with things which are the pastimes of better 
states of health, and the pursuits of philosophers. I mooted 
with myself every point of metaphysics that could get into 
a head into which they had never been put. I made a cause 
of causes for anxiety, by inquiring into causation, and outdid 
the Vicar of Wakefield's Moses, in being my own Sancho- 
niathan and Berosus on the subject of the cosmogony ! I 
jest about it now ; but oh ! what pain was it to me then ! 
and what pangs of biliary will and impossibility I underwent 
in the endeavour to solve these riddles of the universe ! I felt, 
long before I knew Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, — 



" the burthen and the mystery 
Of ail this unintelligible world." 






I reverence the mystery still, but I no longer feel the burden, 
because for these five-and-- thirty years I have known how to 
adjust my shoulders to , it by taking care of my health. I 
should rather say because healthy shoulders have no such 
burden to carry. The elements of existence, like the air 
which we breathe, and which would otherwise crush us, are 
so nicely proportioned to one another within and around them, 



SUFFERING AND REFLECTION. 147 

that we are unconsciously sustained by them, not thoughtfully 
oppressed. 

One great benefit, however, resulted to me from this suffer- 
ing. It gave me an amount of reflection, such as in all pro- 
bability I never should have had without it ; and if readers 
have derived any good from the graver portion of my writings, 
I attribute it to this experience of evil. It taught me patience ; 
it taught me charity (however imperfectly I may have exer- 
cised either); it taught me charity even towards myself; it 
taught me the worth of little pleasures, as well as the dignity 
and utility of great pains ; it taught me that evil itself con- 
tained good ; nay, it taught me to doubt whether any such 
thing as evil, considered in itself, existed ; whether things 
altogether, as far as our planet knows them, could have been 
so good without it; whether the desire, nevertheless, which 
nature has implanted in us for its destruction, be not the signal 
and the means to that end; and whether its destruction, finally, 
will not prove its existence, in the meantime, to have been 
necessary to the very bliss that supersedes it. 

I have been thus circumstantial respecting this illness, or 
series of illnesses, in the hope that such readers as have not 
had experience or reflection enough of their own to dispense 
with the lesson, may draw the following conclusions from suf- 
ferings of all kinds, if they happen to need it : — 

First, — That however any suffering may seem to be purely 
mental, body alone may occasion it; which was undoubtedly 
the case in my instance. 

Second, — That as human beings do not originate their own 
bodies or minds, and as yet very imperfectly know how to 
manage them, they have a right to all the aid or comfort they 
can procure, under any sufferings whatsoever. 

Third, — That whether it be the mind or body that is ailing, 
or both, they may save themselves a world of perplexity and 
of illness by going at once to a physician. 

Fourth, — That till they do so, or in case they are unable 
to do it, a recourse to the first principles of health is their only 
wise proceeding; by which principles I understand air and 
exercise, bathing, amusements, and whatsoever else tends to 
enliven and purify the blood. 

Fifth, — That the blackest day may have a bright morrow; 
for my last and worst illness suddenly left me, probably in 
consequence of the removal, though unconsciously, of some 
internal obstruction ; and it is now for the long period above 

10—2 



148 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

mentioned that I have not had the slightest return of it, though 
I have had many anxieties to endure, and a great deal of sick- 
ness. 

Sixth, — That the far greater portion of a life thus tried may 
nevertheless be remarkable for cheerfulness ; which has been 
the case with my own. 

Seventh, — That the value of cheerful opinions is inestim- 
able ; that they will retain a sort of heaven round a man, when 
everything else might fail him ; and that, consequently, they 
ought to be religiously inculcated in children. 

Eighth and last, — That evil itself has its bright, or at any 
rate its redeeming, side; probably is but the fugitive requisite 
of some everlasting good; and assuredly, in the meantime, 
and in a thousand obvious instances, is the admonisher, the 
producer, the increaser, nay, the very adorner and splendid 
investitor of good ; it is the pain that prevents a worse, the 
storm that diffuses health, the plague that enlarges cities, the 
fatigue that sweetens sleep, the discord that enriches harmonies, 
the calamity that tests affections, the victory and the crown of 
patience, the enrapturer of the embraces of joy. 

I was reminded of the circumstance which gave rise to these 
reflections, by the mention of the friend of whom I spoke last, 
and another brother of whom I went to see during my first 
illness. He was a young and amiable artist, residing at 
Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. He had no conception of what 
I suffered ; and one of his modes of entertaining me was his 
taking me to a friend of his, a surgeon, to see his anatomical 
preparations, and delight my hypochondriacal eyes with grin- 
nings of skulls and delicacies of injected hearts. I have no 
more horror now, on reflection, of those frameworks and ma- 
chineries of the beautiful body in which we live, than I have of 
the jacks and wires of a harpsichord. The first sight revolts 
us simply because life dislikes death, and the human being is 
jarred out of a sense of its integrity by these bits and scraps 
of the material portion of it. But I know it is no more me, than 
it is the feeling which revolts from it, or than the harpsichord 
itself is the music that Haydn or Beethoven put into it. In- 
deed, I did not think otherwise at the time, with the healthier 
part of me ; nor did this healthier part ever forsake me. I 
always attributed what I felt to bodily ailment, and talked as 
reasonably, and for the most part as cheerfully, with my 
friends as usual, nor did I ever once gainsay the cheerfulness 
and hopefulness of my opinions. But I could not look com- 



SUFFERING AND REFLECTION. 149 

fortably on the bones and the skulls nevertheless, though I 
made a point of sustaining the exhibition. I bore anything 
that came, in order that I might be overborne by nothing ; 
and I found this practice of patience very useful. I also took 
part in every diversion, and went into as many different places 
and new scenes as possible ; which reminds me that I once 
rode with my Lincolnshire friend from Gainsborough to Don- 
caster, and that he and I, sick and serious as I was, or rather 
because I was sick and serious (for such extremes meet, and 
melancholy has a good-natured sister in mirth), made, in the 
course of our journey, a hundred and fifty rh vines on the 
word " philosopher." We stopped at that number, only be- 
cause we had come to our journey's end. I shall not apologize 
to the reader for mentioning this boy's play, because I take 
every reader who feels an interest in this book to be a bit of 
a philosopher himself, and therefore prepared to know that 
boy's play and man's play are much oftener identical than 
people suppose, especially when the heart has need of the 
pastime. I need not remind him of the sage, who while play- 
ing with a parcel of schoolboys suddenly stopped at the ap- 
proach of a solemn personage, and said, "We must leave off, 
boys, at present, for here's a fool coming." 

The number of rhymes might be a little more surprising ; 
but the wonder will cease when the reader considers that they 
must have been doggerel, and that there is no end to the 
forms in which rhymes can set off from new given points ; as, 
go so far, throw so far ; nose of her, heaux of her ; toss of her, 
cross of her, &c. 

Spirits of Swift and Butler ! come to my aid, if any chance 
reader, not of our right reading fashion, happen to light upon 
this passage, and be inclined to throw down the book. Come 
to his aid ; for he does not know what he is going to do ; — 
how many illustrious jingles he is about to vituperate ! 

The surgeon I speak of was good enough one day to take 
me with him round the country, to visit his patients. I was 
startled in a respectable farmhouse to hear language openly 
talked in a mixed party of males and females, of a kind that 
seldom courts publicity, and that would have struck with 
astonishment an eulogizer of pastoral innocence. Yet nobody 
seemed surprised at it ; nor did it bring a blush on the cheek 
of a very nice, modest-looking girl. She only smiled, and 
seemed to think it was the man's way. Probably it was no- 
thing more than the language which was spoken in the first 



150 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

circles in times of old, and which thus survived among the 
peasantry, just as we find them retaining words that have 
grown obsolete in cities. The guilt and innocence of manners 
very much depend on conventional agreement ; that is to say, 
on what is thought of them with respect to practice, and to the 
harm or otherwise which they are actually found to produce. 
The very dress which would be shameless in one age or coun- 
try, is respectable in another ; but in neither case is it a moral 
test. When the shame goes in one respect, it by no means 
comes in another ; otherwise all Turks would be saints, and 
all Europeans sinners. The minds of the people in the Lin- 
colnshire farmhouse were " naked and not ashamed." It 
must be owned, however, that there was an amount of con- 
sciousness about them, which savoured more of a pagan than 
a paradisaical state of innocence. 

One of this gentleman's patients was very amusing. He 
was a pompous old gentleman-farmer, cultivating his gout on 
two chairs, and laying clown the law on the state of the nation. 
LordEldon he called " niyLordi£//m'' (Elgin); and he showed 
us what an ignorant man this chancellor was, and w r hat a 
dreadful thing such want of knowledge was for the country. 
The proof of his own fitness for setting things right was thus 
given by his making three mistakes in one word. He took 
Lord Eldon for Lord Elgin ; he took Lord Elgin for the chan- 
cellor ; and he pronounced his lordship's name with a soft g 
instead of a hard one. His medical friend was of course not 
bound to cure his spelling as well as his gout ; so we left him 
in the full-blown satisfaction of having struck awe on the 
Londoner. 

Dr. Young talks of — 

" That hideous sight—a naked human heart :" 

a line not fit to have been written by a human being. The 
sight of the plrysical heart, it must be owned, was trying 
enough to sick eyes ; that of the Doctor's moral heart, accord- 
ing to himself, would have been far worse. I don't believe 
it. I don't believe he had a right thus to calumniate it, much 
less that of his neighbour, and of the whole human race. 

I saw a worse sight than the heart, in a journey which I 
took into a neighbouring country. It was an infant, all over 
sores, and cased in steel — the result of the irregularities of its 
father ; and I confess that I would rather have seen the heart 
of the very father of that child, than I would the child him- 



SUFFERING AND REFLECTION. 151 

self. I am sure it must have bled at the sight. I am sure 
there would have been a feeling of some sort to vindicate 
nature, granting that up to that moment the man had been a 
fool or even a scoundrel. Sullenness itself would have been 
some amends ; some sort of confession and regret. As to the 
poor child, let us trust that the horrible spectacle prevented 
more such; that he was a martyr, dying soon, and going 
to some heaven where little souls are gathered into com- 
fort. I never beheld such a sight, before or since, except in 
one of the pictures of Hogarth, in his Rake's Progress ; and I 
sadden this page with the recollection, for the same reason 
that induced him to paint it. 

I have mentioned that I got rid of a palpitation of the 
heart, which accompanied my first visitation of hypochondria, 
by riding on horseback. The palpitation was so strong and 
incessant, that I was forced, for some nights, to sleep in a 
reclining posture, and I expected sudden death ; but when I 
began the horseback, I soon found that the more I rode, and 
(I used to think) the harder I rode, the less the palpitation 
became. Galloping one day up a sloping piece of ground, 
the horse suddenly came to a stand, by a chalk-pit, and I was 
agreeably surprised to find myself not only unprecipitated 
over his head (for though a decent, I was not a skilful rider), 
but in a state of singular calmness and self-possession — a 
right proper masculine state of nerves. I might have dis- 
covered, as I did afterwards, what it was that so calmed and 
strengthened me. I was of a temperament of body in which 
the pores were not easily opened ; and the freer they were 
kept, the better I was ; but it took me a long time to discover 
that in order to be put into a state of vigour as well as com- 
posure, I required either vigorous exercise or some strong 
moral excitement connected with the sense of action. Un- 
fortunately, I had a tendency to extremes in self-treatment. 
At one time I thought to cure myself by cold-water baths, in 
which I persevered through a winter season; and, subse- 
quently, I hurt myself by hot baths. Late hours at night 
were not mended by lying in bed of a morning ; nor incessant 
reading and writing, by weeks in which I did little but stroll 
and visit. It is true, I can hardly be said to have ever been 
without a book ; for if not in my hand, it was at my side, 
or in my pocket ; but what I needed was ordinary, regular 
habits, accompanied with a more than ordinary amount 
of exercise. I was never either so happy or so tranquil, as 



152 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

when I was in a state the most active. I could very well 
understand the character of an unknown individual, described 
in the prose works of Ben Jonson, who would sit writing day 
and night till he fainted, and then so entirely give himself up 
to diversion, that people despaired of getting him to work 
again. But I sympathized still more with one of the Eucellai 
family, who was so devoted to a sedentary life, that he could 
not endure the thought of being taken from it; till being 
forced, in a manner, to accept a diplomatic mission, he. became 
as vehement for a life of action as he had before been absorbed 
in indolence, and was never satisfied till he was driving every- 
thing before him, and spinning, with his chariot- wheels, from 
one court to another. If I had not a reverence, indeed, for 
whatever has taken place in the ordinance of things, great 
and small, I should often have fancied that some such business 
of diplomacy would have been my proper vocation; for I 
delight in imagining conferences upon points that are to be 
carried, or scenes in which thrones are looked upon, and 
national compliments are to be conveyed ; and I am sure 
that a great deal of action would have kept me in the finest 
health. Whatever dries up the surface of my body, inti- 
midates me ; but when the reverse has been effected by any- 
thing except the warm bath, fear has forsaken me, and my 
spirit has felt as broad and healthy as my shoulders. 

I did not discover this particular cause of healthy sensation 
till long after my recovery. I attributed it entirely to exer- 
cise in general; but by exercise, at all events (and I mention 
the whole circumstance for the benefit of the nervous), health 
was restored to me; and I maintained it as long as I per- 
severed in the means. 

Not long after convalescence, the good that had been done 
me was put further to the test. Some friends, among whom 
were two of my brothers and myself, had a day's boating 
up the Thames. We were very merry and jovial, and not 
prepared to think any obstacle, in the way of our satisfaction, 
possible. On a sudden we perceive a line stretched across 
the river by some fishermen. We call out to them to lower, 
or take it away. They say they will not. One of us holds 
up a knife, and proclaims his intention to cut it. The fisher- 
men defy the knife. Forward goes the knife with the boat, 
and cuts the line in the most beautiful manner conceivable. 
The two halves of the line rushed asunder. 

" Off," cry the fishermen to one another, " and duck 'em." 



SUFFERING AND REFLECTION. 153 

They push out their boat. Their wives (I forget whence 
they issued) appear on the bank, echoing the cry of " Duck 
5 em ! " We halt on our oars, and are come up with, the 
fishermen looking as savage as wild islanders, and swearing 
might and main. My brother and myself, not to let us all be 
run down (for the fishermen's boat was much larger than 
ours, and we had ladies with us, who were terrified) told the 
enemy we would come among them. We did so, going from 
our boat into theirs. 

The determination to duck us now became manifest enough, 
and the fishermen's wives (cruel with their husbands' lost 
fishing) seemed equally determined not to let the intention 
remit. They screamed and yelled like so many furies. The 
fishermen seized my brother John, whom they took for the 
cutter of the line, and would have instantly effected their 
purpose, had he not been clasped round the waist by my 
brother Robert, who kept him tight down in a corner of the 
hold. A violent struggle ensued, during which a ruffianly 
fellow aiming a blow at my brother John's face, whose arms 
were pinioned, I had the good luck to intercept it. Mean- 
while the wives of the boaters were screaming as well as the 
wives of the fishermen; and it was asked our antagonists, 
whether it was befitting brave men to frighten women out of 
their senses. 

The fury seemed to relax a little at this. The word " pay- 
ment " was mentioned, which seemed to relax it more ; but 
it was still divided between threat and demand, when, in the 
midst of a fresh outbreak of the first resolution, beautiful 
evidence was furnished of the magical effects of the word 
"law." 

Luckily for our friends and ourselves (for the enemy had 
the advantage of us, both in strength and numbers), the 
owner of the boat, it seems, had lately been worsted in some 
action of trespass, probably of the very nature of what they 
had been doing with their line. I was then living with my 
brother Stephen, who was in the law. I happened to be 
dressed in black ; and I had gathered from some words which 
fell from them during their rage, that what they had been 
about with their fishing-net was in all probability illegal. I 
assumed it to be so. I mentioned the dreaded word " law;" 
my black coat corroborated its impression ; and, to our equal 
relief and surprise, we found them on the sudden converting 
their rage and extortion into an assumption that w r e meant to 



154 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

settle with their master, and quietly permitting us to get back 
to our friends. 

Throughout this little rough adventure, which at one time 
threatened very distressing, if not serious consequences, I was 
glad to find that I underwent no apprehensions but such as 
became me. The pain and horror that used to be given me 
at sight of human antagonism never entered my head. I felt 
nothing but a flow of brotherhood and determination, and 
returned in fine breathing condition to the oar. I subse- 
quently found that all corporate occasions of excitement 
affected me in the same healthy manner. The mere fact of 
being in a crowd when their feelings were strongly moved, 
to whatever purpose, roused all that was strong in me ; and 
from the alacrity, and even comfort and joy, into which I was 
warmed by the thought of resistance to whatever wrong 
might demand it, I learned plainly enough what a formid- 
able thing a human being might become if he took wrong 
for right, and what reverence was due to the training and 
just treatment of the myriads that compose a nation. 

I was now again in a state of perfect comfort and enjoy- 
ment, the gayer for the cloud which had gone, though occa- 
sionally looking back on it with gravity, and prepared, alas ! 
or rather preparing myself by degrees, to undergo it again in 
the course of a few years by relapsing into a sedentary life. 
Suffer as I might have done, I had not, it seems, suffered 
enough. However, the time was very delightful while it 
lasted. I thoroughly enjoyed my books, my walks, my com- 
panions, my verses ; and I had never ceased to be ready to 
fall in love with the first tender-hearted damsel that should 
encourage me. Now it was a fair charmer, and now a 
brunette ; now a girl who sang, or a girl who danced ; now 
one that was merry, or was melancholy, or seemed to care 
for nothing, or for everything, or was a good friend, or good 
sister, or good daughter. With this last, who completed her 
conquest by reading verses better than I had ever yet heard, 
I ultimately became wedded for life; and she reads verses 
better than ever to this day, especially some that shall be 
nameless.* 

[* Written nearly ten years before the present edition was pub- 
lished : the reader had gone before the author revised his own 
writing, which he left unaltered.] 



155 
CHAPTER IX. 

THE "EXAMINE B." 

At the beginning of the year 1808, my brother John and 
myself set up the weekly paper of the Examiner in joint 
partnership. It was named after the Examiner of Swift and 
his brother Tories. I did not think of their politics. I 
thought only of their wit and fine writing, which, in my 
youthful confidence, I proposed to myself to emulate; and I 
could find no previous political journal equally qualified to be 
its godfather. Even Addison had called his opposition paper 
the Whig Examiner. 

Some years afterwards I had an editorial successor, Mr. 
Fonblanque, who had all the wit for which I toiled, without 
making any pretensions to it. He was, indeed, the genuine 
successor, not of me, but of the Swifts and Addisons them- 
selves; profuse of wit even beyond them, and superior in 
political knowledge. Yet, if I laboured hard for what was 
so easy to Mr. Fonblanque, I will not pretend to think that 
I did not sometimes find it; and the study of Addison and 
Steele, of Goldsmith and Voltaire, enabled me, when I was 
pleased with my subject, to give it the appearance of ease. 
At other times, especially on serious occasions, I too often got 
into a declamatory vein, full of what I thought fine turns and 
Johnsonian antitheses. The new office of editor conspired 
with my success as a critic to turn my head. I wrote, 
though anonymously, in the first person, as if, in addition to 
my theatrical pretensions, I had suddenly become an oracle 
in politics ; the words philosophy, poetry, criticism, states- 
manship, nay, even ethics and theology, all took a final tone 
in my lips. When I remember the virtue as well as know- 
ledge which I demanded from everybody whom I had occasion 
to notice, and how much charity my own juvenile errors 
ought to have considered themselves in need of (however they 
might have been warranted by conventional allowance), I will 
not say I was a hypocrite in the odious sense of the word, 
for it was all done out of a spirit of foppery and " fine 
writing," and I never affected any formal virtues in private ; 
— but when I consider all the nonsense and extravagance of 
those assumptions, all the harm they must have done me 



156 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

in discerning eyes, and all the reasonable amount of resent- 
ment which it was preparing for me with adversaries, I blush 
to think what a simpleton I was, and how much of the conse- 
quences I deserved. It is out of no " ostentation of candour" 
that I make this confession. It is extremely painful to me. 

Suffering gradually worked me out of a good deal of this 
kind of egotism. I hope that even the present most involun- 
tarily egotistical book affords evidence that I am pretty well 
rid of it; and I must add, in my behalf, that, in every other 
respect, never, at that time or at any after time, was I other- 
wise than an honest man. I overrated my claims to public 
attention; but I set out perhaps with as good an editorial 
amount of qualification as most writers no older. I was 
fairly grounded in English history ; I had. carefully read 
De Lolme and Blackstone ; I had no mercenary views what- 
soever, though I was a proprietor of the journal ; and all the 
levity of my animal spirits, and the foppery of the graver part 
of my pretensions, had not destroyed that spirit of martyrdom 
which had been inculcated in me from the cradle. I denied 
myself political as well as theatrical acquaintances ; I was 
the reverse of a speculator upon patronage or employment; 
and I was prepared, with my excellent brother, to suffer man- 
fully, should the time for suffering arrive. 

The spirit of the criticism on the theatres continued the 
same as it had been in the News. In politics, from old family 
associations, I soon got interested as a man, though I never 
could love them as a writer. It was against the grain that 
I was encouraged to begin them ; and against the grain I ever 
afterwards sat down to write, except when the subject was 
of a very general description, and I could introduce philosophy 
and the belles lettres. 

The main objects of the Examiner newspaper were to 
assist in producing Reform in Parliament, liberality of opinion 
in general (especially freedom from superstition), and a fusion 
of literary taste into all subjects whatsoever. It began with 
being of no party; but Reform soon gave it one. It dis- 
claimed all knowledge of statistics ; and the rest of its politics 
were rather a sentiment, and a matter of general training, 
than founded on any particular political reflection. It pos- 
sessed the benefit, however, of a good deal of reading. It never 
wanted examples out of history and biography, or a kind 
of adornment from the spirit of literature; and it gradually 
drew to its perusal many intelligent persons of both sexes, 



THE " EXAMINER." 157 

who would, perhaps, never have attended to politics under 
other circumstances. 

In the course of its warfare with the Tories, the Examiner 
was charged with Bonapartism, with republicanism, with 
disaffection to Church and State, with conspiracy at the tables 
of Burdett, and Cobbett, and Henry Hunt. Now, Sir Francis, 
though he was for a long time our hero, we never exchanged 
a word with ; and Cobbett and Henry Hunt (no relation of 
ours) we never beheld; — never so much as saw their faces. 
I was never even at a public dinner; nor do I believe my 
brother was. We had absolutely no views whatsoever but 
those of a decent competence and of the public good ; and we 
thought, I dare affirm, a great deal more of the latter than 
of the former. Our competence we allowed too much to 
shift for itself. Zeal for the public good was a family inheri- 
tance ; and this we thought ourselves bound to increase. As 
to myself, what I thought of, more than either, was the 
making of verses. I did nothing for the greater part of the 
week but write verses and read books. I then made a rush 
at my editorial duties; took a world of superfluous pains in 
the writing ; sat up late at night, and was a very trying 
person to compositors and newsmen. I sometimes have before 
me the ghost of a pale and gouty printer whom I specially 
caused to suffer, and who never complained. I think of him 
and of some needy dramatist, and wish they had been worse 
men. 

The Examiner commenced at the time when Bonaparte was 
at the height of his power. He had the continent at his feet ; 
and three of his brothers were on thrones. 

I thought of Bonaparte at that time as I have thought ever 
since ; to wit, that he was a great soldier, and little else ; that 
he was not a man of the highest order of intellect, much less 
a cosmopolite ; that he was a retrospective rather than a 
prospective man, ambitious of old renown instead of new ; 
and would advance the age as far, and no farther, as suited 
his views of personal aggrandizement. The Examiner, how- 
ever much it differed with the military policy of Bonaparte's 
antagonists, or however meanly it thought of their under- 
standings, never overrated his own, or was one of his 
partisans. 

I now look upon war as one of the fleeting necessities of 
things in the course of human progress ; as an evil (like 
most other evils) to be regarded in relation to some other evil 



158 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

that would have been worse without it, but always to be 
considered as an indication of comparative barbarism — as a 
necessity, the perpetuity of which is not to be assumed — 
or as a half-reasoning mode of adjustment, whether of dis- 
putes or of populations, which manldnd, on arriving at years 
of discretion, and coming to a better understanding with one 
another, may, and must of necessity, do away. It would 
be as ridiculous to associate the idea of war with an earth 
covered with railroads and commerce, as a fight between 
Holborn and the Strand, or between people met in a drawing- 
room. Wars, like all other evils, have not been without 
their good. They have pioneered human intercourse; have 
thus prepared even for their own eventual abolition ; and 
their follies, losses, and horrors have been made the best of 
by adornments and music, and consoled by the exhibition 
of many noble qualities. There is no evil unmixed with, or 
unproductive of, good. It could not, in the nature of things, 
exist. Antagonism itself prevents it. But nature incites us 
to the diminution of evil; and while it is pious to make the 
best of what is inevitable, it is no less so to obey the im- 
pulse which she has given us towards thinking and making it 
otherwise. 

With respect to the charge of republicanism against the 
Examiner, it was as ridiculous as the rest. Both Napoleon 
and the Allies did, indeed, so conduct themselves on the high 
roads of empire and royalty, and the British sceptre was 
at the same time so unfortunately wielded, that kings and 
princes were often treated with less respect in our pages than 
we desired. But we generally felt, and often expressed, a 
wish to treat them otherwise. The Examiner was always 
quoting against them the Alfreds and Antoninuses of old. 
The " Constitution," with its King, Lords, and Commons, was 
its incessant watchword. The greatest political change which 
it desired was Beform in Parliament ; and it helped to obtain 
it, because it was in earnest. As to republics, the United 
States, notwithstanding our family relationship, were no 
favourites with us, owing to what appeared to us to be an !l 
absorption in the love of money, and to their then want of i 
the imaginative and ornamental ; and the excesses of the 
French K evolution we held in abhorrence. 

With regard to Church and State, the connection was of 
course duly recognized by admirers of the English consti- | 
tution. We desired, it is true, reform in both, being far 






THE " EXAMINER." 159 

• greater admirers of Christianity in its primitive than in any 
i of its subsequent shapes, and hearty accorders with the dictum 
of the apostle, who said that the " letter killeth, but the spirit 
j giveth life." Our version of religious faith was ever nearer 
\ to what M. Lamartine has called the " New Christianity," 
than to that of Doctors Horsley and Philpotts. But we 
heartily advocated the mild spirit of religious government, as 
exercised by the Church of England, in opposition to the 
bigoted part of dissent ; and in furtherance of this advocacy, 
; the first volume of the Examiner contained a series of Essays 
on the Folly and Danger of Methodism, which were after- 
wards collected into a pamphlet. So " orthodox " were these 
\ essays, short of points from which common sense and 
humanity always appeared to us to revolt, and from which 
the deliverance of the Church itself is now, I believe, not 
far off, that in duty to our hope of that deliverance, I after- 
wards thought it necessary to guard against the conclusions 
which might have been drawn from them, as to the amount 
of our assent. A church appeared to me then, as it still 
does, an instinctive want in the human family. 1 never to 
this day pass one, even of a kind the most unreformed, 
without a wish to go into it and join my fellow- creatures 
in their affecting evidence of the necessity of an additional 
tie with Deity and Infinity, with this world and the next. 
But the wish is accompanied with an afflicting regret that 
I cannot recognize it, free from barbarisms derogatory to 
both; and I sigh for some good old country church, finally 
delivered from the corruptions of the Councils, and breathing 
nothing but the peace and love befitting the Sermon on the 
Mount. I believe that a time is coming, when such doctrine, 
and such only, will be preached; and my future grave, in 
! a certain beloved and flowery cemetery, seems quieter for the 
consummation. But I anticipate. 

For a short period before and after the setting up of the 
f Examiner, I was a clerk in the War Office. The situation 
was given me by Mr. Addington, then prime minister, after- 
wards Lord Sidmouth, who knew my father. My sorry stock 
j of arithmetic, which I taught myself on purpose, was suffi- 
! cient for the work which I had to do; but otherwise I made 
j a bad clerk ; wasting my time and that of others in perpetual 
jesting ; going too late to office ; and feeling conscious that 
if I did not quit the situation myself, nothing was more 
likely, or would have been more just, than a suggestion to 



160 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

that effect from others. The establishment of the Examiner, 
and the tone respecting the court and the ministry which 
I soon thought myself bound to adopt, increased the sense 
of the propriety of this measure; and, accordingly, I sent 
in my resignation. Mr. Addington had fortunately ceased 
to be minister before the Examiner was set up ; and though 
I had occasion afterwards to differ extremely with the 
measures approved of by him as Lord Sidmouth, I never 
forgot the personal respect which I owed him for his kindness 
to myself, to his own amiable manners, and to his undoubted, 
though not wise, conscientiousness. He had been Speaker 
of the House of Commons, a situation for which his figure and 
deportment at that time of life admirably fitted him. I think 
I hear his fine voice, in his house at Richmond Park, good- 
naturedly expressing to me his hope, in the words of the 
poet, that it might be one day said of me, — 

" — Not in fancy's maze he wander'd long, 
But stoop'd to truth, and moralized his song," 

The sounding words, " moralized his song," came toning out 
of his dignified utterance like " sonorous metal." This was 
when I went to thank him for the clerkship. I afterwards 
sat on the grass in the park, feeling as if I were in a dream, 
and wondering how I should reconcile my propensity to verse- 
making with sums in addition. The minister, it was clear, 
thought them not incompatible: nor are they. Let nobody 
think otherwise, unless he is prepared to suffer for the mis- 
take, and, what is worse, to make others suffer. The body 
of the British Poets themselves shall confute him, with 
Chaucer at their head, who was a " comptroller of wool" and 
" clerk of works." 

" Thou nearest neither that nor this" 
(says the eagle to him in the House of Fame 
" For when thy labour all done is, 

And hast made all thy reckonings, 

Instead of rest and of new things, 

Thou goest home to thine house anon, 

And all so dumb as any stone 

Thou sittest at another book, 

Till fully dazed is thy look." 

Lamb, it is true, though he stuck to it, has complained of 

" The dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood: " 

and Chaucer was unable to attend to his accounts in the 

month of May, when, as he tells us, he could not help passing 



LITEBARY ACQUAINTANCE. 161 

whole days in the fields, looking at the daisies. The case, 
as in all other matters, can only be vindicated, or otherwise, 
by the consequences. But that is a perilous responsibility; 
and it involves assumptions which ought to be startling to 
the modesty of young rhyming gentlemen not in the receipt 
of an income. 

I did not give up, however, a certainty for an uncertainty. 
The Examiner was fully established when I quitted the office 
[in 1808]. My friends thought that I should be better able 
to attend to its editorship ; and it was felt, at any rate, that 
I could not with propriety remain. So I left my fellow- clerks 
to their better behaviour and quieter rooms ; and set my face 
in the direction of stormy politics. 



CHAPTER X. 
LITEBAKY ACQUAINTANCE. 



Just after this period I fell in with a new set of acquaintances, 
accounts of whom may not be uninteresting. I forget what 
it was that introduced me to Mr. Hill, proprietor of the 
Monthly Mirror ; but at his house at Sydenham I used to 
meet his editor, Du Bois ; Thomas Campbell, who was his 
neighbour ; and the two Smiths, authors of The Rejected 
Addresses. I saw also Theodore Hook, and Mathews the 
comedian. Our host was a jovial bachelor, plump and rosy 
as an abbot ; and no abbot could have presided over a more 
festive Sunday. The wine flowed merrily and long ; the 
discourse kept pace with it ; and next morning, in returning 
to town, we felt ourselves very thirsty. A pump by the road- 
side, with a plash round it, was a bewitching sight. 

Du Bois was one of those wits who, like the celebrated 
Eachard, have no faculty of gravity. His handsome hawk's 
eyes looked blank at a speculation ; but set a joke or a piece 
of raillery in motion, and they sparkled with wit and malice. 
Nothing could be more trite or commonplace than his serious 
observations. Acquiescences they should rather have been 
called ; for he seldom ventured upon a gravity, but in echo 
of another's remark. If he did, it was in defence of ortho- 
doxy, of which he was a great advocate ; but his quips and 
cranks were infinite. He was also an excellent scholar. He, 
Br. King, and Eachard would have made a capital trio over 

11 



1G2 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

a table, for scholarship, mirth, drinking, and religion. He 
was intimate with Sir Philip Francis, and gave the public 
a new edition of the Horace of Sir Philip's father. The 
literary world knew him well also as the writer of a popular 
novel in the genuine Fielding manner, entitled Old Nick. 

Mr. Du Bois held his editorship of the Monthly Mirror 
very cheap. He amused himself with writing notes on 
Athenasus, and was a lively critic on the theatres ; but half 
the jokes in his magazine were written for his friends, and 
must have ~ mystified the uninitiated. His notices to corre- 
spondents were often made up of this by-play ; and made his 
friends laugh, in proportion to their obscurity to every one 
else. Mr. Du Bois subsequently became a magistrate in the 
Court of Bequests ; and died the other day at an advanced 
age, in spite of his love of port. But then he was festive in 
good taste ; no gourmand ; and had a strong head withal. I 
do not know whether such men ever last as long as teetotallers ; 
but they certainly last as long, and look a great deal younger, 
than the carking and severe. 

They who knew Mr. Campbell only as the author of Ger- 
trude of Wyoming, and the Pleasures of Hope, would not 
have suspected him to be a merry companion, overflowing 
with humour and anecdote, and anything but fastidious. 
These Scotch poets have always something in reserve. It 
is the only point in which the major part of them resemble 
their countrymen. The mistaken character which the lady 
formed of Thomson from his Seasons is well known. He let 
part of the secret out in his Castle of Indolence ; and the more 
he let out, the more honour it did to the simplicity and cor- 
diality of the poet's nature, though not always to the elegance 
of it. Allan Bamsay knew his friends Gay and Somerville 
as well in their writings as he did when he came to be per- 
sonally acquainted with them; but Allan, who had bustled 
up from a barber's shop into a bookseller's, was "a cunning 
shaver ; " and nobody would have guessed the author of the 
Gentle Shepherd to be penurious. Let none suppose that any 
insinuation to that effect is intended against Campbell. He 
was one of the few men whom I could at any time have 
walked half a dozen miles through the snow to spend an 
evening with ; and I could no more do this with a penurious 
man, than I could with a sulky one. I know but of one 
fault he had, besides an extreme cautiousness in his writings, 
and that one was national, a matter of words, and amply 



LITERARY ACQUAINTANCE. 163 

overpaid by a stream of conversation, lively, piquant, and 
liberal, not the less interesting for occasionally betraying an 
intimacy with pain, and for a high and somewhat strained 
tone of voice, like a man speaking with suspended breath, 
and in the habit of subduing his feelings. No man felt more 
kindly towards his fellow-creatures, or took less credit for it. 
When he indulged in doubt and sarcasm, and spoke con- 
temptuously of things in general, he did it partly, no doubt, 
out of actual dissatisfaction, but more, perhaps, than he sus- 
pected, out of a fear of being thought weak and sensitive ; 
which is a blind that the best men very commonly practise. 
He professed to be hopeless and sarcastic, and took pains all 
the while to set up a university (the London). 

When I first saw this eminent person, he gave me the idea 
of a French Virgil. Not that he was like a Frenchman, 
much less the French translator of Virgil. I found him as 
handsome as the Abbe Delille is said to have been ugly. 
But he seemed to me to embody a Frenchman's ideal notion 
of the Latin poet ; something a little more cut and dry than 
I had looked for ; compact and elegant, critical and acute, 
with a consciousness of authorship upon him ; a taste over- 
anxious not to commit itself, and refining and diminishing 
nature as in a drawing-room mirror. This fancy was 
strengthened in the course of conversation, by his expa- 
tiating on the greatness of Eacine. I think he had a volume 
of the French poet in his hand. His skull was sharply cut 
and fine ; with plenty, according to the phrenologists, both of 
the reflective and amative organs : and his poetry will bear 
them out. For a lettered solitude, and a bridal properly got 
up, both according to law and luxury, commend us to the 
lovely Gertrude of Wyoming. His face and person were 
rather on a small scale ; his features regular ; his eye lively 
and penetrating ; and when he spoke, dimples played about 
his mouth, which, nevertheless, had something restrained and 
close in it. Some gentle puritan seemed to have crossed the 
breed, and to have left a stamp on his face, such as we often 
see in the female Scotch face rather than the male. But he 
appeared not at all grateful for this ; and when his critiques 
and his Virgilianism were over, very unlike a puritan he 
talked ! He seemed to spite his restrictions ; and, out of the 
natural largeness of his sympathy with things high and low, 
to break at once out of Delille's Virgil into Cotton's, like a boy 
let loose from schooL When I had the pleasure of hearing 

11—2 



164 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

him afterwards, I forgot his Virgilianisms, and thought only 
of the delightful companion, the unaffected philanthropist, and 
the creator of a beauty worth all the heroines in Racine. 

Campbell tasted pretty sharply of the good and ill of the 
present state of society, and, for a bookman, had beheld 
strange sights. He witnessed a battle in Germany from the 
top of a convent (on which battle he has left us a noble ode) ; 
and he saw the French cavalry enter a town, wiping their 
bloody swords on the horses' manes. He was in Germany a 
second time, — I believe to purchase books ; for in addition to 
his classical scholarship, and his other languages, he was a 
reader of German. The readers there, among whom he is 
popular, both for his poetry and his love of freedom, crowded 
about him with affectionate zeal ; and they gave him, what 
he did not dislike, a good dinner. Like many of the great 
men in Germany — Schiller, Wieland, and others — he did not 
scruple to become editor of a magazine ; and his name alone 
gave it a recommendation of the greatest value, and such as 
made it a grace to write under him. 

I remember, one day at Sydenham, Mr. Theodore Hook 
coming in unexpectedly to dinner, and amusing us very much 
with his talent at extempore verse. He was then a youth, 
tall, dark, and of a good person, with small eyes, and features 
more round than weak ; a face that had character and humour, 
but no refinement. His extempore verses were really sur- 
prising. It is easy enough to extemporize in Italian — one 
only wonders how, in a language in which everything con- 
spires to render verse-making easy, and it is difficult to avoid 
rhyming, this talent should be so much cried up — but in 
English it is another matter. I have known but one other 
person besides Hook, who could extemporize in English, and 
he wanted the confidence to do it in public. Of course, I 
speak of rhyming. Extempore blank verse, with a little 
practice, would be found as easy in English as rhyming is in 
Italian. In Hook the faculty was very unequivocal. He 
could not have been pre-informed about all the visitors on 
the present occasion, still less of the subject of conversation 
when he came in, and he talked his full share till called upon ; 
yet he ran his jokes and his verses upon us all in the easiest 
manner, saying something characteristic of everybody, or 
avoiding it with a pun; and he introduced so agreeably a 
piece of village scandal upon which the party had been 
rallying Campbell, that the poet, though not unjealous of his 



LITERARY ACQUAINTANCE. 165 

dignity, was, perhaps, the most pleased of us all. Theodore 
afterwards sat down to the pianoforte, and, enlarging upon 
this subject, made an extempore parody of a modern opera, in- 
troducing sailors and their clap-traps, rustics, &c, and making 
the poet and his supposed flame the hero and heroine. He 
parodied music as well as words, giving us the most received 
cadences and flourishes, and calling to mind (not without some 
hazard to his filial duties) the commonplaces of the pastoral 
songs and duets of the last half-century ; so that if Mr. 
Dignum, the Damon of Vauxhall, had been present, he would 
have doubted whether to take it as an affront or a compli- 
ment. Campbell certainly took the theme of the parody as 
a compliment; for having drunk a little more wine than 
usual that evening, and happening to wear a wig on account 
of having lost his hair by a fever, he suddenly took off the 
wig, and dashed it at the head of the performer, exclaiming, 
" You dog ! I'll throw my laurels at you." 

I have since been unable to help wishing, perhaps not very 
wisely, that Campbell would have been a little less careful and 
fastidious in what he did for the public ; for, after all, an 
author may reasonably be supposed to do best that which he 
is most inclined to do. It is our business to be grateful for 
what a poet sets before us, rather than to be wishing that his 
peaches were nectarines, or his Falernian champagne. Camp- 
bell, as an author, was all for refinement and classicality, not, 
however, without a great deal of pathos and luxurious fancy. 
His merry jongleur, Theodore Hook, had as little propensity, 
perhaps, as can be imagined, to any of those niceties : yet in 
the pleasure of recollecting the evening which I passed with 
him, I was unable to repress a wish, as little wise as the 
other; to wit, that he had stuck to his humours and farces, 
for which he had real talent, instead of writing politics. 
There was ability in the novels which he subsequently wrote ; 
but their worship of high life and attacks on vulgarity were 
themselves of the vulgarest description. 

Mathews, the comedian, I had the pleasure of seeing at 
Mr. Hill's several times, and of witnessing his imitations, 
which, admirable as they were on the stage, were still more 
so in private. His wife occasionally came with him, with her 
handsome eyes, and charitably made tea for us. Many years 
afterwards I had the pleasure of seeing them at their ow T n 
table ; and I thought that while Time, with unusual courtesy, 
had spared the sweet countenance of the lady, he had given 



166 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

> 
more force and interest to that of the husband in the very 
ploughing of it up. Strong lines, had been cut, and the face 
stood them well. I had seldom been more surprised than on 
coming close to Mathews on that occasion, and seeing the bust 
which he possessed in his gallery of his friend Liston. Some 
of these comic actors, like comic writers, are as unfarcical as 
can be imagined in their interior. The taste for humour 
comes to them by the force of contrast. The last time I had 
seen Mathews, his face appeared to me insignificant to what it 
was then. On the former occasion, he looked like an irritable 
in-door pet ; on the latter, he seemed to have been grappling 
with the world, and to have got vigour by it. His face had 
looked out upon the Atlantic, and said to the old waves, " Buffet 
on ; I have seen trouble as well as you." The paralytic 
affection, or whatever it was, that twisted his mouth when 
young, had formerly appeared to be master of his face, and 
given it a character of indecision and alarm. It now seemed 
a minor thing ; a twist in a piece of old oak. And what a 
bust was Liston's ! The mouth and chin, with the throat 
under it, hung like an old bag ; but the upper part of the 
head was as fine as possible. There was a speculation, a look- 
out, and even an elevation of character in it, as unlike the 
Liston on the stage, as Lear is to King Pippin. One might 
imagine Laberius to have had such a face. 

The reasons why Mathews' imitations were still better in 
private than in public were, that he was more at his ease per- 
sonally, more secure of his audience (" fit though few"), and 
able to interest them with traits of private character, which 
could not have been introduced on the stage. He gave, for 
instance, to persons who he thought could take it rightly, a 
picture of the manners and conversation of Sir Walter Scott, 
highly creditable to that celebrated person, and calculated to 
add regard to admiration. His commonest imitations were 
not superficial. Something of the mind and character of the 
individual was always insinuated, often with a dramatic dress- 
ing, and plenty of sauce piquante. At Sydenham he used to 
give us a dialogue among the actors, each of whom found 
fault with another for some defect or excess of his own — 
Kemble objecting to stiffness, Munden to grimace, and so on. 
His representation of Incledon was extraordinary : his nose 
seemed actually to become aquiline. It is a pity I cannot put 
upon paper, as represented by Mr. Mathews, the singular 
gabblings of that actor, the lax and sailor-like twist of mind, 



LITERARY ACQUAINTANCE. 167 

with which everything hung upon him ; and his profane 
pieties in quoting the Bible ; for which, and swearing, he 
seemed to have an equal reverence. He appeared to be 
charitable to everybody but Braham. He would be described 
as saying to his friend Holman, for instance, "My dear 
George, don't be abusive, George ; — don't insult, — don't be 
indecent, by G — d ! You should take the beam out of your 
own eye, — what the devil is it — you know — in the Bible ? 
something" (the a very broad) " about a beam, my dear 
George ! and — and — and a mote ; — you'll find it in any part 
of the Bible : yes, George, my dear boy, the Bible, by G — d," 
(and then with real fervour and reverence,) " the Holy Scrip- 
ture, G — d d — me ! " He swore as dreadfully as a devout 
knight-errant. Braham, whose trumpet blew down his wooden 
walls, he could not endure. He is represented as saying one 
day, with a strange mixture of imagination and matter-of-fact, 
that " he only wished his beloved master, Mr. Jackson, could 
come down from heaven, and take the Exeter stage to London 
to hear that d — d Jew ! " 

As Hook made extempore verses on us, so Mathews one 
day gave an extempore imitation of us all round, with the 
exception of a young theatrical critic (videlicet, myself), in 
whose appearance and manner he pronounced that there was 
no handle for mimicry. This, in all probability, was intended 
as a politeness towards a comparative stranger, but it might 
have been policy ; and the laughter was not missed by it. At 
all events, the critic was both good-humoured enough, and at 
that time self-satisfied enough, to have borne the mimicry ; 
and no harm would have come of it. 

One morning, after stopping all night at this pleasant 
house, I was getting up to breakfast, when I heard the noise 
of a little boy having his face washed. Our host was a merry 
bachelor, and to the rosiness of a priest might, for aught I 
knew, have added the paternity ; but I had never heard of it, 
and still less expected to find a child in his house. More 
obvious and obstreperous proofs, however, of the existence of 
a boy with a dirty face could not have been met with. You 
heard the child crying and objecting ; then the woman remon- 
strating ; then the cries of the child snubbed and swallowed 
up in the hard towel ; and at intervals out came his voice 
bubbling and deploring, and was again swallowed up. At 
breakfast, the child being pitied, I ventured to speak about it, 
and was laughing and sympathizing in perfect good faith, 



168 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH SUNT. 

when Mathews came in, and I found that the little urchin 
was he. 

The same morning he gave us his immortal imitation of 
old Tate Wilkinson, patentee of the York Theatre. Tate had 
been a little too merry in his youth, and was very melancholy 
in old age. He had a wandering mind and a decrepit body; 
and being manager of a theatre, a husband, and a ratcatcher, 
he would speak, in his wanderings, " variety of wretchedness." 
He would interweave, for instance, all at once, the subjects of 
a new engagement at his theatre, the rats, a veal-pie, Garrick 
and Mrs. Siddons, and Mrs. Tate and the doctor. I do not 
pretend to give a specimen : Mathews alone could have done 
it ; but one trait I recollect, descriptive of Tate himself, which 
will give a good notion of him. On coming into the room, 
Mathews assumed the old manager's appearance, and pro- 
ceeded towards the window, to reconnoitre the state of the 
weather, which was a matter of great importance to him. 
His hat was like a hat worn the wrong way, side foremost, 
looking sadly crinkled and old ; his mouth was desponding, 
his eye staring, and his whole aspect meagre, querulous, and 
prepared for objection. This miserable object, grunting and 
hobbling, and helping himself with everything he can lay 
hold of as he goes, creeps up to the window ; and, giving a 
glance at the clouds, turns round with an ineffable look of 
despair and acquiescence, ejaculating, u Uh Christ!" 

Of James Smith, a fair, stout, fresh-coloured man, with 
round features, I recollect little, except that he used to read to 
us trim verses, with rhymes as pat as butter. The best of his 
verses are in the Rejected Addresses — and they are excellent. 
Isaac Hawkins Browne, with his Pipe of Tobacco, and all the 
rhyming jeux-d esprit in all the Tracts, are extinguished in 
the comparison ; not excepting the Probationary Odes. Mr. 
Fitzgerald found himself bankrupt in non sequiturs ; Crabbe 
could hardly have known which was which, himself or his 
parodist; and Lord Byron confessed to me, that the summing 
up of his philosophy, to wit, that 

" Nought is everything, and everything is nought," 

was very posing. Mr. Smith would sometimes repeat after 
dinner, with his brother Horace, an imaginary dialogue, 
stuffed full of incongruities, that made us roll with laughter. 
His ordinary verse and prose were too full of the ridicule of 



LITERARY ACQUAINTANCE. 1G9 

city pretensions. To be superior to anything, it should not 
always be running in one's head. 

His brother Horace was delicious. Lord Byron used to 
say, that this epithet should be applied only to eatables ; and 
that he wondered a friend of his (I forget who) that was 
critical in matters of eating, should use it in any other sense. 
I know not what the present usage may be in the circles, but 
classical authority is against his lordship, from Cicero down- 
wards; and I am content with the modern warrant of another 
noble wit, the famous Lord Peterborough, who, in his fine, 
open way, said of Fenelon, that he was such a " delicious 
creature, he was forced to get away from him, else he would 
have made him pious!" I grant there is something in the 
word delicious which may be said to comprise a reference to 
every species of pleasant taste. It is at once a quintessence 
and a compound ; and a friend, to deserve the epithet, ought, 
perhaps, to be capable of delighting us as much over our wine, 
as on graver occasions. Fenelon himself could do this, with 
all his piety ; or rather he could do it because his piety was 
of the true sort, and relished of everything that was sweet and 
affectionate. A finer nature than Horace Smith's, except in 
the single instance of Shelley, I never met with in man ; nor 
even in that instance, all circumstances considered, have I a 
right to say that those who knew him as intimately as I did 
the other, would not have had the same reasons to love him. 
Shelley himself had the highest regard for Horace Smith, as 
may be seen by the following verses, the initials in which the 
reader has here the pleasure of filling up : — 

"Wit and sense, 
Virtue and human knowledge, all that might 
Make this dull world a business of delight, 
Are all combined in H. S." 

Horace Smith differed with Shelley on some points; but 
on others, which all the world agree to praise highly and to 
practise very little, he agreed so entirely, and showed un- 
equivocally that he did agree, that with the exception of one 
person (Vincent Novello), too diffident to gain such an honour 
from his friends, they were the only two men I had then met 
with, from whom I could have received and did receive advice 
or remonstrance with perfect comfort, because I could be sure 
of the unmixed motives and entire absence of self-reflection, 
with which it would come from them.* Shelley said to me 

* Notwithstanding his caprices of temper, I must add Hazlitt, who 
was quite capable, when he chose, of giving genuine advice, and 



170 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

once, " I know not what Horace Smith must take me for 
sometimes : I am afraid he must think me a strange fellow : 
but is it not odd, that the only truly generous person I ever 
knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a 
stockbroker ? And he writes poetry too," continued Shelley, 
his voice rising in a fervour of astonishment — " he writes 
poetry and pastoral dramas, and yet knows how to make 
money, and does make it, and is still generous ! " Shelley 
had reason to like him. Horace Smith was one of the few 
men, who, through a cloud of detraction, and through all that 
difference of conduct from the rest of the world which 
naturally excites obloquy, discerned the greatness of my 
friend's character. Indeed, he became a witness to a very 
unequivocal proof of it, which I shall mention by-and-by. 
The mutual esteem was accordingly very great, and arose 
from circumstances most honourable to both parties. " I be- 
lieve," said Shelley on another occasion, " that I have only to 
say to Horace Smith that I want a hundred pounds or two, 
and he would send it me without any eye to its being 
returned; such faith has he that I have something within me 
beyond what the world supposes, and that I could only ask 
his money for a good purpose." And Shelley would have 
sent for it accordingly, if the person for whom it was intended 
had not said Nay. I will now mention the circumstance 
which first gave my friend a regard for Horace Smith. It 
concerns the person just mentioned, who is a man of letters. 
It came to Mr. Smith's knowledge, many years ago, that this 
person was suffering under a pecuniary trouble. He knew 
little of him at the time, but had met him occasionally ; and 
he availed himself of this circumstance to write him a letter 
as full of delicacy and cordiality as it could hold, making it a 
matter of grace to accept a bank-note of 100Z., which he en- 
closed. I speak on the best authority, that of the obliged 
person himself; who adds that he not only did accept the 
money, but felt as light and happy under the obligation, as 
he has felt miserable under the very report of being obliged 
to some ; and he says that nothing could induce him to with- 
hold his name, but a reason which the generous, during his 
lifetime, would think becoming. 

I have said that Horace Smith was a stockbroker. He 
left business with a fortune, and went to live in France, 

making you sensible of his disinterestedness. Lamb could have done 
it, too; but for interference of any sort he had an abhorrence. 



LITERARY ACQUAINTANCE. 171 

where, if he did not increase, he did not seriously diminish 
it ; and France added to the pleasant stock of his knowledge. 

On returning to England, he set about exerting himself in 
a manner equally creditable to his talents and interesting to 
the public. I would not insult either the modesty or the 
understanding of my friend while he was alive, by comparing 
him with the author of Old Mortality and Guy Mannering ; 
but I ventured to say, and I repeat, that the earliest of his 
novels, Brambletye House, ran a hard race with the novel of 
Woodstock, and that it contained more than one character not 
unworthy of the best volumes of Sir Walter. I allude to the 
ghastly troubles of the Eegicide in his lone house ; the out- 
ward phlegm and merry inward malice of Winky Boss (a 
happy name), who gravely smoked a pipe with his mouth, and 
laughed with his eyes ; and, above all, to the character of the 
princely Dutch merchant, who would cry out that he should 
be ruined, at seeing a few nutmegs dropped from a bag, and 
then go and give a thousand ducats for an antique. This is 
hitting the high mercantile character to a nicety — minute and 
careful in its means, princely in its ends. If the ultimate 
effect of commerce (permulti transibunt, &c.) were not some- 
thing very different from what its pursuers imagine, the 
character would be a dangerous one to society at large, 
because it throws a gloss over the spirit of money-getting ; 
but, meanwhile, nobody could paint it better, or has a greater 
right to recommend it, than he who has been the first to 
make it a handsome portrait. 

The personal appearance of Horace Smith, like that of 
most of the individuals I have met with, was highly indicative 
of his character. His figure was good and manly, inclining to 
the robust ; and his countenance extremely frank and cordial ; 
sweet without weakness. I have been told he was irascible. 
If so, it must have been no common offence that could have 
irritated him. He had not a jot of it in his appearance. 

Another set of acquaintances which I made at this time 
used to assemble at the hospitable table of Mr. Hunter the 
bookseller, in St. Paul's Churchyard. They were the sur- 
vivors of the literary party that were accustomed to dine with 
his predecessor, Mr. Johnson. They came, as of old, on the 
Friday. The most regular were Fuseli and Bonnycastle. 
Now and then, Godwin was present: oftener Mr. Kinnaird 
the magistrate, a great lover of Horace. 

Fuseli was a small man, with energetic features, and a 



172 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

white head of hair. Our host's daughter, then a little girl, 
used to call him the white-headed lion. He combed his hair 
up from the forehead ; and as his whiskers were large, his 
face was set in a kind of hairy frame, which, in addition to 
the fierceness of his look, really gave him an aspect of that 
sort. Otherwise, his features were rather sharp than round. 
He would have looked much like an old military officer, if 
his face, besides its real energy, had not affected more. There 
was the same defect in it as in his pictures. Conscious of not 
having all the strength he wished, he endeavoured to make 
up for it by violence and pretension. He carried this so far, 
as to look fiercer than usual when he sat for his picture. His 
friend and engraver, Mr. Houghton, drew an admirable like- 
ness of him in this state of dignified extravagance. He is 
sitting back in his chair, leaning on his hand, but looking 
ready to pounce withal. His notion of repose was like that 
of Pistol : 

" Now, Pistol, lay thy head in Furies' lap." 
Agreeably to this over-wrought manner, he was reckoned, I 
believe, not quite so bold as he might have been. He painted 
horrible pictures, as children tell horrible stories ; and was 
frightened at his own lay-figures. Yet he would hardly have 
talked as he did about his terrors, had he been as timid as 
some supposed him. With the affected, impression is the 
main thing, let it be produced how it may. A student of the 
i Academy told me, that Mr, Fuseli coming in one night, when 
a solitary candle had been put on the floor in a corner of the 
room, to produce some effect or other, he said it looked " like 
a damned soul." This was by way of being Dantesque, as 
Michael Angelo was. Fuseli was an ingenious caricaturist of 
that master, making great bodily displays of mental energy, 
and being ostentatious with his limbs and muscles, in propor- 
tion as he could not draw them. A leg or an arm was to be 
thrust down one's throat, because he knew we should dispute 
the truth of it. In the indulgence of this wilfulness of pur- 
pose, generated partly by impatience of study, partly by want 
of sufficient genius, and no doubt, also, by a sense of supe- 
riority to artists who could do nothing but draw correctly, he 
cared for no time, place, or circumstance in his pictures. A 
set of prints, after his designs, for Shakspeare and Cowper, 
exhibit a chaos of mingled genius and absurdity, such as, 
perhaps, was never before seen. He endeavoured to bring 
Michael Angelo's apostles and prophets, with their super- 



LITERARY ACQUAINTANCE. 173 

human ponderousness of intention, into the commonplaces 
of modern life. A student reading in a garden, is all over 
intensity of muscle; and the quiet tea-table scene in Cowper, 
he has turned into a preposterous conspiracy of huge men 
and women, all bent on showing their thews and postures, 
with dresses as fantastical as their minds. One gentleman, of 
the existence of whose trousers you are not aware till you see 
the terminating line at the ankle, is sitting and looking grim 
on a sofa, with his hat on and no waistcoat. Yet there is real 
genius in his designs for Milton, though disturbed, as usual, by 
strainings after the energetic. His most extraordinary mistake, 
after all, is said to have been on the subject of his colouring. 
It was a sort of livid green, like brass diseased. Yet they say, 
that when praised for one of his pictures, he would modestly 
observe, " It is a pretty colour." This might have been 
thought a jest on his part, if remarkable stories were not told 
of the mistakes made by other people with regard to colour. 
Sight seems the least agreed upon of all the senses. 

Fuseli was lively and interesting in conversation, but not 
without his usual faults of violence and pretension. Nor was 
he always as decorous as an old man ought to be ; especially 
one whose turn of mind is not of the lighter and more 
pleasurable cast. The licences he took were coarse, and had 
not sufficient regard to his company. Certainly they went 
a great deal beyond his friend Armstrong ; to whose account, 
I believe, Fuseli's passion for swearing was laid. The poet 
condescended to be a great swearer, and Fuseli thought it 
energetic to swear like him. His friendship with Bonny castle 
had something childlike and agreeable in it. They came and 
went away together, for years, like a couple of old school- 
boys. They, also, like boys, rallied one another, and some- 
times made a singular display of it, — Fuseli, at least; for it 
was he that was the aggressor. 

Bonnycastle was a good fellow. He was a tall, gaunt, 
long-headed man, with large features and spectacles, and a 
deep internal voice, with a twang of rusticity in it ; and he 
goggled over his plate, like a horse. I often thought that a 
bag of corn would have hung well on him. His laugh was 
equine, and showed his teeth upwards at the sides. Words- 
worth, who notices similar mysterious manifestations on the 
part of donkeys, would have thought it ominous. Bonny- 
castle was extremely fond of quoting Shakspeare and telling 
stories ; and if the Edinburgh Review had just come out, 



174 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

would give us all the jokes in it. He had once a hypo- 
chondriacal disorder of long duration ; and he told us, that 
he should never forget the comfortable sensation given him 
one night during this disorder, by his knocking a landlord, 
that was insolent to him, down the man's staircase. On the 
strength of this piece of energy (having first ascertained that 
the offender was not killed) he went to bed, and had a sleep 
of unusual soundness. Perhaps Bonnycastle thought more 
highly of his talents than the amount of them strictly war- 
ranted ; a mistake to which scientific men appear to be more 
liable than others, the universe they work in being so large, 
and their universality (in Bacon's sense of the word) being 
often so small. But the delusion was not only pardonable, 
but desirable, in a man so zealous in the performance of his 
duties, and so much of a human being to all about him, as 
Bonnycastle was. It was delightful one day to hear him 
speak with complacency of a translation which had appeared 
of one of his books in Arabic, and which began by saying, 
on the part of the translator, that " it had pleased God, for 
the advancement of human knowledge, to raise us up a Bonny- 
castle." Some of his stories were a little romantic, and no 
less authentic. He had an anecdote of a Scotchman, who 
boasted of being descended from the Admirable Crichton; in 
proof of which, the Scotchman said he had " a grit quantity 
of table-leenen in his possassion, marked A. C, Admirable 
Creechton." 

Kinnaird, the magistrate, was a sanguine man, under the 
middle height, with a fine lamping black eye, lively to the 
last, and a body that " had increased, was increasing, and 
ought to have been diminished; " which is by no means what 
he thought of the prerogative. Next to his bottle he was 
fond of his Horace; and, in the intervals of business at the 
police-office, would enjoy both in his arm-chair. Between 
the vulgar calls of this kind of magistracy, and the perusal 
of the urbane Horace, there must have been a gusto of con- 
tradiction, which the bottle, perhaps, was required to render 
quite palatable. Fielding did not love his bottle the less 
for being obliged to lecture the drunken. Nor did his son, 
who succeeded him in taste and office. I know not how a 
former poet-laureat, Mr. Pye, managed,— another man of 
letters, who was fain to accept a situation of this kind. 
Having been a man of fortune and a member of Parliament, 
and loving his Horace to boot, he could hardly have done 



POLITICAL CHARACTERS. 175 

without his wine. I saw him once in a state of scornful 
indignation at being interrupted in the perusal of a manu- 
script by the monitions of his police-officers, w r ho were 
obliged to remind him over and over again that he was a 
magistrate, and that the criminal multitude were in waiting. 
Every time the door opened, he threatened and implored. 
" Otium divos rogat in patenti 
Prensus JEgxo" 
Had you quoted this to Mr. Kinnaird, his eyes would have 
sparkled with good-fellowship : he would have finished the 
verse and the bottle with you, and proceeded to as many 
more as your head could stand. Poor fellow ! the last time 
I saw him, he was an apparition formidably substantial. The 
door of our host's dining-room opened without my hearing 
it, and, happening to turn round, I saw a figure in a great- 
coat, literally almost as broad as it was long, and scarcely 
able to articulate. He was dying of a dropsy, and was 
obliged to revive himself, before he was fit to converse, by 
the wine that was killing him. But he had cares besides, 
and cares of no ordinary description ; and, for my part, I will 
not blame even his wine for killing him, unless his cares 
could have done it more agreeably. After dinner that day, 
he was comparatively himself again, quoted his Horace as 
usual, talked of lords and courts with a relish, and begged 
that God save the King might be played to him on the piano- 
forte; to which he listened, as if his soul had taken its hat 
off. I believe he would have liked to die to God save the 
King, and to have " waked and found those visions true." 



CHAPTER XI. 
POLITICAL CHARACTERS. 



The Examiner had been set up towards the close of the 
reign of George the Third, three years before the appoint- 
ment of the regency. Pitt and Fox had died two years 
before ; the one, in middle life, of constant ill-success, preying 
on a sincere but proud, and not very large mind, and unwisely 
supported by a habit of drinking ; the other, of older but 
more genial habits of a like sort, and of demands beyond 
his strength by a sudden accession to office. The king — a 
conscientious but narrow-minded man, obstinate to a degree 



176 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

(which had lost him America), and not always dealing 
ingenuously, even with his advisers — had lately got rid of 
Mr. Fox's successors, on account of their urging the Catholic 
claims. He had summoned to office in their stead Lords 
Castlereagh, Liverpool, and others, who had been the clerks 
of Mr. Pitt; and Bonaparte was at the height of his power 
as French Emperor, setting his brothers on thrones, and com- 
pelling our Eussian and German allies to side with him under 
the most mortifying circumstances of tergiversation. 

It is a melancholy period for the potentates of the earth 
when they fancy themselves obliged to resort to the shabbiest 
measures of the feeble ; siding against a friend with his 
enemy ; joining in accusations against him at the latter's 
dictation ; believed by nobody on either side ; returning to 
the friend, and retreating from him, according to the fortunes 
of war; secretly hoping that the friend will excuse them by 
reason of the pauper's plea, necessity; and at no time able 
to give better apologies for their conduct than those " myste- 
rious ordinations of Providence " which are the last refuge 
of the destitute in morals, and a reference to which they 
contemptuously deny to the thief and the " king's evidence." 
It proves to them, " with a vengeance," the " something 
rotten in the state of Denmark;" and will continue to prove 
it, and to be despicable, whether in bad or good fortune, till 
the world find out a cure for the rottenness. 

Yet this is what the allies of England were in the habit of 
doing, through the whole contest of England with France. 
When England succeeded in getting up a coalition against 
Napoleon, they denounced him for his ambition, and set out 
to fight him. When the coalition was broken by his armies, 
they turned round at his bidding, denounced England, and 
joined him in fighting against their ally. And this was the 
round of their history : a coalition and a tergiversation alter- 
nately ; now a speech and a fight against Bonaparte, who 
beat them ; then a speech and a fight against England, who 
bought them off; then, again, a speech and a fight against . 
Bonaparte, who beat them again ; and then, as before, a 
speech and fight against England, who again bought them off. 
Meanwhile, they took everything they could get, whether from 
enemy or friend, seizing with no less greediness whatever bits 
of territory Bonaparte threw to them for their meanness, than 
pocketing the millions of Pitt, for which we are paying to 
this day. 






POLITICAL CHARACTERS. 177 

It becomes us to bow, and to bow humbly, to the " myste- 
rious dispensations of Providence;" but in furtherance of 
those very dispensations, it has pleased Providence so to con- 
stitute us, as to render us incapable of admiring such conduct, 
whether in king's evidences or in kings ; and some of the 
meanest figures that present themselves to the imagination, in 
looking back on the events of those times, are the Emperors 
of Austria and Russia, and the King of Prussia. It is salu- 
tary to bear this in mind, for the sake of royalty itself. What 
has since ruined Louis Philippe, in spite of all his ability, is 
his confounding royal privileges with base ones, and his not 
keeping his word as a gentleman. 

If it be still asked, what are kings to do under such cir- 
cumstances as those in which they were placed with Bona- 
parte? what is their alternative? it is to be replied, firstly, 
that the question has been answered already, by the mode in 
which the charge is put ; and, secondly, that whatever they 
do, they must either cease to act basely, and like the meanest 
of mankind, or be content to be regarded as such, and to 
leave such stains on their order as tend to produce its down- 
fall, and to exasperate the world into the creation of republics. 
Eepublics, in the first instance, are never desired for their own 
sakes. I do not think they will be finally desired at all ; 
certainly not unaccompanied by curtly graces and good 
breeding, and whatever can tend to secure to them ornament 
as well as utility. I do not think it is in human nature to 
be content with a different settlement of the old question, any 
more than it is in nature physical to dispense with her pomp 
of flowers and colours. But sure I am, that the first cravings 
for republics always originate in some despair created by the 
conduct of kings. 

It might be amusing to bring together a few of the exor- 
diums of those same speeches, or state papers, of the allies of 
George the Third ; but I have not time to look for them ; 
and perhaps they would prove tiresome. It is more interest- 
ing to consider the " state" which Bonaparte kept in those 
days, and to compare it with his exile in St. Helena. There 
are more persons, perhaps, in the present generation who 
think of Bonaparte as the captive of Great Britain, defeated 
by Wellington, than as the maker of kings and queens, reign- 
ing in Paris, and bringing monarchs about his footstool. 

But the fortunes of Napoleon were on the decline when 
they appeared to be at their height. The year 1808 beheld 

12 



178 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

at once their culmination and their descent ; and it was the 
feeblest of his vassals who, by the very excess of his ser- 
vility, gave the signal for the change. Fortunately, too, for 
the interests of mankind, the change was caused by a violation 
of the most obvious principles of justice and good sense. It 
was owing to the unblushing seizure of Spain. It was owing 
to the gross and unfeeling farce of a pretended sympathy with 
the Spanish king's quarrel with his son ; to the acceptance of a 
throne which the ridiculous father had no right to give away; 
and to the endeavour to force the accession on a country, 
which, instead of tranquilly admitting it on the new principles 
of indifference to religion and zeal for advancement (as he 
had ignorantly expected), opposed it with the united vehe- 
mence of dogged bigotry and an honest patriotism. 

Spain was henceforth the millstone hung round the neck 
of the conqueror ; and his marriage with a princess of Austria, 
which was thought such a wonderful piece of success, only 
furnished him with a like impediment ; for it added to the 
weight of his unpopularity with all honest and prospective 
minds. It was well said by Cobbett, that he had much 
better have assembled a hundred of the prettiest girls in 
France, and selected the prettiest of them all for his wife. 
The heads and hearts of the " Young Continent" were hence- 
forward against the self-seeker, ambitious of the old " shows of 
things," in contradiction to the honest " desires of the mind." 
Want of sympathy was prepared for him in case of a reverse ; 
and when, partly in the confidence of his military pride, 
partly by way of making a final set-off against his difficulties 
in Spain, and partly in very ignorance of what Eussian 
natures and Eussian winters could effect, he went and ran his 
head against the great northern wall of ice and snow, he came 
back a ruined man, masterly and surprising as his efforts to rein- 
state himself might thereafter be. Nothing remained for him 
but to fume and fret in spirit, get fatter with a vitiated state 
of body, and see reverse on reverse coming round him, which 
he was to face to no purpose. The grandest thing he did was 
to return from Elba: the next, to fight the battle of Waterloo; 
but he went to the field, bloated and half asleep, in a carriage. 
He had already, in body, become one of the commonest of 
those " emperors " whom he had first laughed at and then 
leagued with : no great principle stood near him, as it did in 
the times of the republic, when armies of shoeless youths beat 
the veteran troops of Austria; and thus, deserted by every- 



POLITICAL CHARACTERS. 179 

thing but his veterans and his generalship, which came to 
nothing before the unyieldingness of English, and the advent 
of Prussian soldiers, he became a fugitive in the "belle 
France" which he had fancied his own, and died a prisoner 
in the hands of a man of the name of Lowe. 

I do not believe that George the Third, or his minister, 
Mr. Pitt, speculated at all upon a catastrophe like this. I 
mean, that I do not believe they reckoned upon Napoleon's 
destroying himself by his own ambition. They looked, it is 
true, to the chance of " something turning up;" but it was 
to be of the ordinary kind. They thought to put him down 
by paid coalitions, and in the regular course of war. Hence, 
on repeated failures, the minister's broken heart, and probably 
the final extinguishment of the king's reason. The latter 
calamity, by a most unfortunate climax of untimeliness, took 
place a little before his enemy's reverses. 

George the Third was a very brave and honest man. He 
feared nothing on eartk, and he acted according to his con- 
victions. But, unfortunately, his convictions were at the 
mercy of a will far greater than his understanding ; and hence 
his courage became obstinacy, and his honesty the dupe of 
his inclinations. He was the son of a father with little brain, 
and of a mother who had a diseased blood : indeed, neither 
of his parents was healthy. He was brought up in rigid 
principles of morality on certain points, by persons who are 
supposed to have evaded them in their own conduct ; he was 
taught undue notions of kingly prerogative ; he was suffered 
to grow up, nevertheless, in homely as well as shy and moody 
habits ; and while acquiring a love of power tending to the 
violent and uncontrollable, he was not permitted to have a 
taste of it till he became his own master. The consequences 
of this training were an extraordinary mixture of domestic 
virtue with official duplicity ; of rustical, mechanical tastes 
and popular manners, with the most exalted ideas of authority ; 
of a childish and self-betraying cunning, with the most stub- 
born reserves ; of fearlessness with sordidness ; good-nature 
with unforgivingness ; and of the health and strength of tem- 
perance and self-denial, with the last weaknesses of under- 
standing, and passions that exasperated it out of its reason. 
The English nation were pleased to see in him a crowning 
specimen of themselves — a royal John Bull. They did not 
discover till too late (perhaps have not yet discovered), how 
much of the objectionable, as well as the respectable, lies 

12—2 



180 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

hidden in the sturdy nickname invented for them by Arbuth- 
not; how much the animal predominates in it over the 
intellectual ; and how terribly the bearer of it may be over- 
ridden, whether in a royal or a national shape. They had 
much better get some new name for themselves, worthy of 
the days of Queen Victoria and of the hopes of the world. 

In every shape I reverence calamity, and would not be 
thought to speak of it with levity, especially in connection 
with a dynasty which has since become estimable, as well as 
reasonable, in every respect. 

If the histories of private as well as public families were 
known, the race of the Guelphs would only be found, in the 
person of one of their ancestors, to have shared, in common 
perhaps with every family in the world, the sorrows of occa- 
sional deterioration. But in the greatest and most tragical 
examples of human suffering, the homeliest, as well as the 
loftiest images, are too often forced on the mind together. 
George the Third, with all his faults* was a more estimable 
man than many of his enemies, and, certainly, than any of 
his wholesale revilers ; and the memory of his last days is 
sanctified by whatever can render the loss of sight and of 
reason affecting. 

Whatever of any kind has taken place in the world, may 
have been best for all of us in the long run. Nature permits 
us, retrospectively and for comfort's sake, though not in a dif- 
ferent spirit, to entertain that conclusion among others. But 
meantime, either because the world is not yet old enough to 
know better, or because we yet live but in the tuning of its 
instruments, and have not learned to play the harmonies of 
the earth sweetly, men feel incited by what is good as well as 
bad in them, to object and to oppose ; and youth being the 
season of inexperience and of vanity, as well as of enthusiasm 
otherwise the most disinterested, the Examiner, which began 
its career, like most papers, with thinking the worst of those 
from whom it differed, and expressing its mind accordingly 
with fearless sincerity (which was not equally the case with 
those papers), speedily excited the anger of Government. It 
did this the more, inasmuch as, according to what has been 
stated of its opinions on foreign politics, and in matters of 
church government, it did not fall into the common and half- 
conciliating because degrading error of antagonists, by siding, 
as a matter of course, with the rest of its enemies. 

I need not reopen the questions of foreign and domestic 



POLITICAL CHARACTERS. 181 

policy which were mooted with the ruling powers in those 
days, Reform in particular. The result is well known, and 
the details in general have ceased to be interesting. I would 
repeat none of them at all, if personal history did not give a 
new zest to almost any kind of relation. As such, however, 
is the case, I shall proceed to observe that the Examiner 
had not been established a year when Government insti- 
tuted a prosecution against it, in consequence of some re- 
marks on a pamphlet by a Major Hogan, who accused the 
Duke of York, as Commander-in-chief, of favouritism and 
corruption. 

Major Hogan was a furious but honest Irishman, who had 
been in the army seventeen years. He had served and suf- 
fered bitterly ; in the West Indies he possessed the highest 
testimonials to his character, had been a very active recruit- 
ing officer, had seen forty captains promoted over his head in 
spite of repeated applications and promises, and he desired, 
after all, nothing but the permission to purchase his advance- 
ment, agreeably to every custom. 

Provoked out of his patience by these fruitless endeavours 
to buy what others who had done nothing obtained for nothing, 
and being particularly disgusted at being told, for the sixth 
time, that he had been " noted for promotion, and would be 
duly considered as favourable opportunities offered," the 
gallant Hibernian went straight, without any further ado, to 
the office of the Commander-in-chief, and there, with a 
vivacity and plain-speaking which must have looked like a 
scene in a play, addressed his Royal Highness in a speech 
that astounded him. 

The Major explained to the royal Commander-in-chief how 
more than forty captains had been promoted without pur- 
chase, who had been his juniors when he was a captain, and 
how it had been suggested to him that he might obtain a 
majority without purchase by paying six hundred pounds as 
a bribe to certain persons. The Duke of York made no 
reply, asked no questions, but looked astounded. " Vox 
faucibus hcesit? The Major proceeded to state his case in a 
pamphlet for publication. The day after his first advertise- 
ment, a lady in a barouche, with two footmen, called at the 
newspaper office for his address, and on the following evening 
an anonymous letter was left at his lodging, telling him that 
to maintain secrecy would benefit him with the royal family, 
and hoping that " the enclosed" (notes for 500/.) would pre- 



182 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

vent the publication of his intended pamphlet. The receipt 
of this letter was properly attested by several witnesses. 
Major Hogan declined to be influenced by such agencies, and 
instantly announced that the money should be returned. 

The Examiner made comments on these disclosures, of a 
nature that was to be expected from its ardour in the cause of 
Eeform ; not omitting, however, to draw a distinction between 
the rights of domestic privacy and the claims to indulgence 
set up by traffickers in public corruption. The Government, 
however, cared nothing for this distinction ; neither would it 
have had the corruption inquired into. Its prosecutions were 
of a nature that did not allow truth to be investigated ; and 
one of these was accordingly instituted against us, when it 
was unexpectedly turned aside by a member of Parliament, 
Colonel Wardle, who was resolved to bring the female alluded 
to by Major Hogan before the notice of that tribunal. 

I say " unexpectedly," because neither then, nor at any 
time, had I the least knowledge of Colonel Wardle. The 
Examiner, so to speak, lived quite alone. It sought nobody ; 
and its principles in this respect had already become so well 
understood that few sought it, and no one succeeded in 
making its acquaintance. The colonel's motion for an investi- 
gation came upon us, therefore, like a god-send. The pro- 
secution against the paper was dropped ; and the whole 
attention of the country was drawn to the strange spectacle of 
a laughing, impudent woman, brought to the bar of the House 
of Commons, and forcing them to laugh in their turn at the 
effrontery of her answers. The poor Duke of York had 
parted with her, and she had turned against him. 

The upshot of the investigation was, that Mrs. Clarke had 
evidently made money by the seekers of military promotion, 
but that the duke was pronounced innocent of connivance. 
His Eoyal Highness withdrew, however, from office for a 
time (for he was not long afterwards reinstated), and public 
opinion, as to his innocence or guilt, went meanwhile pretty 
much according to that of party. 

My own impression, at this distance of time, and after 
better knowledge of the duke's private history and prevailing 
clmracter, is, that there was some connivance on his part, but 
not of a systematic nature, or beyond what he may have 
considered as warrantable towards a few special friends of his 
mistress, on the assumption that she would carry her influence 
no farther. His own letters proved that he allowed her to 



POLITICAL CHARACTERS. 183 

talk to him of people with a view to promotion. He even let 
her recommend him a clergyman, who (as he phrased it) had 
an ambition to " preach before royalty." He said he would 
do what he could to bring it about ; probably thinking nothing 
whatsoever — I mean, never having the thought enter his head 
— of the secret scandal of the thing, or not regarding his 
consent as anything but a piece of good-natured patronizing 
acquiescence, after the ordinary fashion of the " ways of the 
world." 

For, in truth, the Duke of York was as good-natured a 
man as he was far from being a wise one. The investigation 
gave him a salutary caution ; but I really believe, on the 
whole, that he had already been, as he was afterwards, a very 
good, conscientious war-office clerk. He was a brave man, 
though no general ; a very filial, if not a very thinking poli- 
tician (for he always voted to please his father); and if he 
had no idea of economy, it is to be recollected how easily 
princes' debts are incurred, — how often encouraged by the 
creditors who complain of them; and how often, and how 
temptingly to the debtor, they are paid off by governments. 

As to his amours, the temptations of royalty that way are 
still greater : the duke seems to have regarded a mistress in 
a very tender and conjugal point of view, as long as the lady 
chose to be equally considerate ; and if people wondered why 
such a loving man did not love his duchess — who appears to 
have been as good-natured as himself — the wonder ceased 
when they discovered that her Eoyal Highness was a lady 
of so whimsical a taste, and possessed such an overflowing 
amount of benevolence towards the respectable race of beings 
hight dogs, that in the constant occupation of looking after 
the welfare of some scores of her canine friends, she had 
no leisure to cultivate the society of those human ones that 
could better dispense with her attentions. 

The ministers naturally grudged the Examiner its escape 
from the Hogan prosecution, especially as they gained nothing 
with the paper, in consequence of their involuntary forbear- 
ance. Accordingly, before another year was out, they insti- 
tuted a second prosecution ; and so eager were they to bring 
it, that, in their haste, they again overleaped their prudence. 
Headers in the present times, when more libels have been 
written in a week by Toryism itself against royalty, in the 
most irreverent style, than appeared in those days in the 
course of a year from pens the most radical, and against 



184 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

princes the most provoking, are astonished to hear that the 
offence we had committed consisted of the following sentence : 

u Of all monarchs since the Eevolution, the successor of 
George the Third will have the finest opportunity of becoming 
nobly popular." 

But the real offence was the contempt displayed towards 
the ministers themselves. The article in which the sentence 
appeared, was entitled " Change of Ministry ;" the Duke of 
Portland had just retired from the premiership ; and the 
Examiner had been long girding him and his associates on 
the score of general incompetency, as well as their particular 
unfitness for constitutional government. The ministers cared 
nothing for the king, in any sense of personal zeal, or of a 
particular wish to vindicate or exalt him. The tempers, 
caprices, and strange notions of sincerity and craft to which 
he was subject, by neutralizing in a great measure his ordi- 
nary good nature and somewhat exuberant style of inter- 
course on the side of familiarity and gossiping, did not render 
him a very desirable person to deal with, even among friends. 
But he was essentially a Tory king, and so far a favourite of 
Tories ; he was now terminating the fiftieth year of his reign ; 
there was to be a jubilee in consequence ; and the ministers 
thought to turn the loyalty of the holiday into an instrument 
of personal revenge. 

The passage in that article charged with being libellous 
was the following [reproduced now as a specimen of what 
was considered libel in those days] : — 

" Whatever may be the truth of these statements, it is generally 
supposed that the mutilated administration, in spite of its tenacity of 
life, cannot exist much longer; and the Foxites, of course, are begin- 
ning to rally round their leaders, in order to give it the coup de grace, 
A more respectable set of men they certainly are, — with more general 
information, more attention to the encouragement of intellect, and 
altogether a more enlightened policy; and if his Majesty could be 
persuaded to enter into their conciliatory views with regard to Ire- 
land, a most important and most necessary benefit would be obtained 
for this country. The subject of Ireland, next to the difficulty of 
coalition, is no doubt the great trouble in the election of his Majesty's 
servants; and it is this, most probably, which has given rise to the 
talk of a regency, a measure to which the court would never resort 
while it felt a possibility of acting upon its own principles. What 
a crowd of blessings rush upon one's mind, that might be bestowed 
upon the country in the event of such a change! Of all monarchs, 
indeed, since the revolution, the successor of George the Third will 
have the finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular." 

The framers of the indictment evidently calculated on the 



POLITICAL CHARACTERS. 185 

usual identification of a special with a Tory jury. They had 
reckoned, at the same time, so confidently on the effect to be 
produced with that class of persons, by any objection to the 
old king, that the proprietor of the Morning Chronicle, Mr. 
Perry, was prosecuted for having extracted only the two 
concluding sentences ; and as the Government was still more 
angered with the Whigs who hoped to displace them, than 
with the Eadicals who wished to see them displaced, Mr. 
Perry's prosecution preceded ours. This was fortunate ; for 
though the proprietor of the Morning Chronicle pleaded his 
own cause, an occasion in which a man is said to have "a fool 
for his client " (that is to say, in the opinion of lawyers), he 
pleaded it so well, and the judge (Ellenborough), who after- 
wards showed himself so zealous a Whig, gave him a hearing 
and construction so favourable, that he obtained an acquittal, 
and the prosecution against the Examiner accordingly fell to 
the ground. 

I had the pleasure of a visit from this gentleman while his 
indictment was pending. He came to tell me how he meant 
to conduct his defence.' Pie was a lively, good-natured man, 
with a shrewd expression of countenance, and twinkling eyes, 
which he not unwillingly turned upon the ladies. I had lately 
married, and happened to be sitting with my wife. A chair 
was given him close to us ; but as he was very near-sighted, 
and yet could not well put up his eyeglass to look at her (which 
purpose, nevertheless, he was clearly bent on effecting), he 
took occasion, while speaking of the way in which he should 
address the jury, to thrust his face close upon hers, observing 
at the same time, with his liveliest emphasis, and, as if ex- 
pressly for her information, " I mean to be very modest." 

The unexpectedness of this announcement, together with 
the equivocal turn given to it by the vivacity of his move- 
ment, had all the effect of a dramatic surprise, and it was 
with difficulty we kept our countenances. 

Mr. Perry subsequently became one of my warmest friends, 
and, among other services, would have done me one of a very 
curious nature, which I will mention by-and-by.* 

* [This is the first mention that the writer makes of his marriage, 
and it is a striking example of the manner in which, for various 
reasons, but principally out of delicacy to living persons, he felt 
himself bound to pass over, with very slight allusions, the greater 
part of his personal and private life. In the present instance there 
was no practical reason for this reserve, unless it was that if the 



186 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUM 1 . 

Of the ministers, whom a young journalist thus treated 
with contempt, I learned afterwards to think better. Not as 
ministers : for I still consider them, in that respect, as the 
luckiest, and the least deserving their luck, of any statesmen 
that have been employed by the House of Brunswick. I speak 
not only of the section at that moment reigning, but of the 
whole of what was called Mr. Pitt's successors. But with 
the inexperience and presumption of youth, I was too much 
in the habit of confounding difference of opinion with dis- 
honest motives. I did not see (and it is strange how people, 
not otherwise wanting in common sense or modesty, can 
pass whole lives without seeing !) that if I had a right to have 

author had entered upon domestic matters, he might, with his almost 
exaggerated sense of the active obligations which truth -speaking 
involved, have felt bound to enter into personal questions and per- 
haps judgments, which he thought it better to waive. The dominating 
motives for this characteristic reserve are treated in the closing chapter 
of the volume. Leigh Hunt was married in 1809, to Marianne, the 
daughter of Thomas and Ann Kent. Mr. Kent had died compara- 
tively young. His widow had obtained an independent livelihood as 
a dressmaker in rather a " high " connection ; amongst her acquaint- 
ance was the young editor, who fell in love with the eldest daughter, 
and married her after a long courtship. The bride was the reverse of 
handsome, and without accomplishments ; but she had a pretty figure, 
beautiful black hair which reached down to her knees, magnificent 
eyes, and a very unusual natural turn for plastic art. She was an 
active and thrifty housewife, until the curious malady with which she 
was seized totally undermined her strength. Mrs. Kent, her mother, 
who had perhaps acquired some harshness of character in a very 
hard school of adversity, never quite succeeded in retaining the 
regard of her son-in-law, — one reason, perhaps, for the reserve which 
has been noticed. Mrs. Kent made, indeed, some fearful mistakes in 
her sternness ; but she was really a very kind-hearted woman, only 
too anxious to please, and faithful in the attachments which she 
formed, even when disappointed. She subsequently married Mr. 
Rowland Hunter, a man of keen observation and simple mind, who 
has survived to a great age, and whose hearty friendship was cor- 
dially appreciated by Leigh Hunt, as they both advanced in years. 
Rowland Hunter was the nephew and successor of Johnson, the well- 
known bookseller in St. Paul's Churchyard, and the early patron of 
the poet Cowper. Johnson acquired celebrity for his success in busi- 
ness, his intelligence, and his peculiar hospitality; and Mr. Hunter 
continued his custom of keeping open house weekly for literary men, 
the friends of literature, and persons of any individual mark. At 
his house, the young author encountered a great variety of minds, 
and most unquestionably derived great advantage from the opportu- 
nity. His conversation frequently turned upon his recollections of 
these gatherings, and it was in this house that he formed many of 
his literary and personal acquaintances.] 



POLITICAL CHARACTERS. 187 

good motives attributed to myself by those who differed with 
me in opinion, I was bound to reciprocate the concession. 
I did not reflect that political antagonists have generally been 
born and bred in a state of antagonism, and that for any 
one of them to demand identity of opinion from another on 
pain of his being thought a man of bad motives, was to 
demand that he should have had the antagonist's father and 
mother as well as his own — the same training, the same 
direction of conscience, the same predilections and very preju- 
dices; not to mention, that good motives themselves might 
have induced a man to go counter to all these, even had 
he been bred in them ; which, in one or two respects, was the 
case with myself. 

Canning, indeed, was not a man to be treated with con- 
tempt under any circumstances, by those who admired wit 
and rhetoric ; though, compared with what he actually 
achieved in either, I cannot help thinking that his position 
procured him an undue measure of fame. What has he left 
us to perpetuate the amount of it ? A speech or two, and 
the Ode on the Knife -Grinder. This will hardly account, 
with the next ages, for the statue that occupies the highway 
in V/estminster ; a compliment, too, unique of its kind ; 
monopolizing the parliamentary pavement, as though the 
original had been the only man fit to go forth as the repre- 
sentative of Parliament itself, and to challenge the admiration 
of the passengers. The liberal measures of Canning's last 
days renewed his claim on the public regard, especially as he 
was left, by the jealousy and resentment of his colleagues, to 
carry them by himself: jealousy, because, small as his wit 
was for a great fame, they had none of their own to equal it; 
and resentment, because in its indiscretions and inconside- 
rateness, it had nicknamed or bantered them all round, — the 
real cause, I have no doubt, of that aristocratical desertion 
of his ascendancy which broke his heart at the very height of 
his fortunes. But at the time I speak of, I took him for 
nothing but a great sort of impudent Eton boy, with an un- 
feelingness that surpassed his ability. Whereas he was a man 
of much natural sensibility, a good husband and father, and 
an admirable son. Canning continued, as long as he lived, to 
write a letter every week to his mother, who had been an 
actress, and whom he treated, in every respect, with a con- 
sideration and tenderness that may be pronounced to have 
been perfect. " Good son" should have been written under 



188 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

his statue. It would have given the somewhat pert look of 
his handsome face a pleasanter effect; and have done him a 
thousand times more good with the coming generations than 
his Ode on the Knife- Grinder. 

The Earl of Liverpool, whom Madame de Stael is said 
to have described as having a " talent for silence," and to 
have asked, in company, what had become of " that dull 
speaker, Lord Hawkesbury " (his title during his father's 
lifetime), was assuredly a very dull minister; but I believe 
he was a very good man. His father had been so much in 
the confidence of the Earl of Bute at the accession of 
George III., as to have succeeded to his invidious reputation 
of being the secret adviser of the king; and he continued 
in great favour during the whole of the reign. The son, 
with little interval, was in office during the whole of the war 
with Napoleon ; and after partaking of all the bitter draughts 
of disappointment which ended in killing Pitt, had the luck 
of tasting the sweets of triumph. I met him one day, not 
long afterwards, driving his barouche in a beautiful spot 
where he lived, and was so struck with the melancholy of his 
aspect, that, as I did not know him by sight, I asked a 
passenger who he was. 

The same triumph did not hinder poor Lord Castlereagh 
from dying by his own hand. The long burden of respon- 
sibility had been too much, even for him ; though, to all 
appearance, he was a man of a stronger temperament than 
Lord Liverpool, and had, indeed, a very noble aspect. He 
should have led a private life, and been counted one of the 
models of the aristocracy; for though a ridiculous speaker, 
and a cruel politician (out of impatience of seeing constant 
trouble, and not knowing otherwise how to end it), he was 
an intelligent and kindly man in private life, and could be 
superior to his position as a statesman.* He delighted in 
the political satire of the Beggar's Opera ; has been seen 
applauding it from a stage box ; and Lady Morgan tells us, 
would ask her in company to play him the songs on the 
pianoforte, and good-humouredly accompany them with a bad 
voice. How pleasant it is thus to find oneself reconciled 
to men whom we have ignorantly undervalued ! and how 
fortunate to have lived long enough to say so ! 

* [The amount, and even existence, of the cruelty here attributed 
to Lord Castlereagh, have since been denied, and apparently not 
without reason.] 



POLITICAL CHARACTERS. 189 

The Examiner, though it preferred the Whigs to the 
Tories, was not a "Whig of the school then existing. Its 
great object was a reform in Parliament, which the older 
and more influential Whigs did not advocate, which the 
younger ones (the fathers of those now living) advocated but 
fitfully and misgivingly, and which had lately been suffered 
to fall entirely into the hands of those newer and more 
thorough-going Whigs, which were known by the name of 
Eadicals, and have since been called Whig-Radicals, and 
Liberals. The opinions of the Examiner, in fact, both as 
to State and Church government, allowing, of course, for 
difference of position in the parties, and tone in their mani- 
festation, were those that have since swayed the destinies 
of the country, in the persons of Queen Victoria and her 
ministers. I do not presume to give her Majesty the name 
of a partisan ; or to imply that, under any circumstances, 
she would condescend to accept it. Her business, as she well 
knows and admirably demonstrates, is, not to side with any 
of the disputants among her children, but to act lovingly and 
dispassionately for them all, as circumstances render expe- 
dient. But the extraordinary events which took place on the 
Continent during her childhood, the narrow political views 
of most of her immediate predecessors, her own finer and 
more genial understanding, and the training of a wise mother, 
all these circumstances in combination have rendered her 
what no prince of her house has been before her, — equal 
to the demands not only of the nation and the day, but of 
the days to come, and the popular interests of the world. 
So, at least, I conceive. I do not pretend to any special 
knowledge of the court or its advisers. I speak from what 
I have seen of her Majesty's readiness to fall in with every 
great and liberal measure for the education of the country, 
the freedom of trade, and the independence of nations; and 
I spoke in the same manner, before I could be suspected 
of confounding esteem with gratitude. She knows how, and 
nobly dares, to let the reins of restriction in the hands of 
individuals be loosened before the growing strength and self- 
government of the many ; and the royal house that best knows 
how to do this, and neither to tighten those reins in anger 
nor abandon them out of fear, will be the last house to suffer 
in any convulsion which others may provoke, and the first 
to be reassured in their retention, as long as royalty shall 
exist. May it exist, under the shape in which I can picture 



190 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

it to my imagination, as long as reasonableness can outlive 
envy, and ornament be known to be one of nature's desires ! 
Excess, neither of riches nor poverty, would then endanger 
it. I am no republican, nor ever was, though I have lived 
during a period of history when kings themselves tried hard 
to make honest men republicans by their apparent unteach- 
ableness. But my own education, the love, perhaps, of 
poetic ornament, and the dislike which I had conceived at 
that time of an existing republic, even of British origin, kept 
me within the pale of the loyal. I might prefer, perhaps, 
a succession of queens to kings, and a simple fillet on their 
brows to the most gorgeous diadem. I think that men more 
willingly obey the one, and I am sure that nobody could 
mistake the cost of the other. But peaceful and reasonable 
provision for the progress of mankind towards all the good 
possible to their nature, from orderly good manners up to 
disinterested sentiments, is the great desideratum in govern- 
ment ; and thinking this more securely and handsomely main- 
tained in limited monarchies than republics, I am for English 
permanence in this respect, in preference to French muta- 
bility, and American electiveness ; though, at the same tim<J 
I cannot but consider the two great nations of France ana 
the United States as setting us enviable examples in regard to 
the more amiable sociality of the one and the special and 
constant consideration for women in the other. 

The Tory Government having failed in its two attacks on 
the Examiner, could not be content, for any length of time, 
till it had failed in a third. For such was the case. The new 
charge was again on the subject of the army — that of military 
flogging. An excellent article on the absurd and cruel nature 
of that punishment, from the pen of the late Mr. John Scott 
(who afterwards fell in a duel with one of the writers in 
Blackwood), had appeared in a country paper, the Stamft rd 
News, of which he was editor. The most striking passa v -es 
of this article were copied into the Examiner, and it i& a 
remarkable circumstance in the history of juries, that after > 
the journal which copied it had been acquitted in London, the 
journal which originated the copied matter was found guilty 
in Stamford ; and this, too, though the counsel was the same 
in both instances — the present Lord Brougham. 

The attorney-general at that time was Sir Vicary Gibbs ; 
a name which it appears somewhat ludicrous to me to write 
at present, considering what a bugbear it was to politicians. 



POLITICAL CHAEACTEES. 191 

and how insignificant it has since become. Sir Vicary was 
a little, irritable, sharp-featured, bilious-looking man (so at 
least he was described, for I never saw him) ; very worthy, I 
believe, in private ; and said to be so fond of novels, that he 
would read them after the labours of the day, till the wax- 
lights guttered without his knowing it. I had a secret regard 
for him on this account, and wished he would not haunt me 
in a spirit so unlike Tom Jones. I know not what sort of 
lawyer he was ; probably none the worse for imbuing himself 
with the knowledge of Fielding and Smollett ; but he was a 
bad reasoner, and made half-witted charges. He used those 
edge-tools of accusation which cut a man's own fingers. He 
assumed that we could have no motives for writing but mer- 
cenary ones; and he argued, that because Mr. Scott (who 
had no more regard for Bonaparte than we had) endeavoured 
.to shame down the practice of military flogging by pointing 
to the disuse of it in the armies of France, he only wanted to 
• subject his native country to invasion. He also had the sim- 
plicity to ask, why we did not " speak privately on the sub- 
ject to some member of Parliament," and get him to notice it 
, in a proper manner, instead of bringing it before the public 
r in a newspaper ? We laughed at him ; and the event of his 
accusations enabled us to laugh more. 

The charge of being friends of Bonaparte against all who 
differed with Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Canning was a com- 
mon, and, for too long a time, a successful trick, with such of 
the public as did not read the writings of the persons accused. 
I have often been surprised, much later in life, both in re- 
lation to this and to other charges, at the credulity into which 
many excellent persons had owned they had been thus 
beguiled, and at the surprise which they expressed in turn at 
finding the charges the reverse of true. To the readers of 

i Examiner they caused only indignation or merriment. 
, The last and most formidable prosecution against us remains 
<o be told; but some intermediate circumstances must be re- 
lated first. 



192 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 



CHAPTER XII. 

LITEEAEY WAEFAHE. 

The Examiner had been established between two and tliret 
years, when [in 1810] my brother projected a quarterly ma- 
gazine of literature and politics, entitled the Reflector, which 
I edited. Lamb, Dyer, Barnes, Mitchell, the Greek Professoi 
Scholefield (all Christ-Hospital men), together with Dr. Aikii: 
and his family, wrote in it ; and it was rising in sale ever} 
quarter, when it stopped at the close of the fourth number foi 
want of funds. Its termination was not owing to want o: 
liberality in the payments. But the radical reformers in 
those days were not sufficiently rich or numerous to suppon 
such a publication. 

Some of the liveliest effusions of Lamb first appeared ir 
this magazine ; and in order that I might retain no influentia. 
class for my good wishers, after having angered the stage, dis- 
satisfied the Church, offended the State, not very well pleased 
the Whigs, and exasperated the Tories, I must needs com- 
mence the maturer part of my verse-making with contributing 
to its pages the Feast of the Poets. 

The Feast of the Poets was (perhaps, I may say, is) a jeu- 
<T esprit suggested by the Session of the Poets of Sir Johr 
Suckling. Apollo gives the poets a dinner ; and many verse- 
makers, who have no claim to the title, present themselves 
and are rejected. 

With this effusion, while thinking of nothing but showing 
my wit, and reposing under the shadow of my " laurels " (o: 
which I expected a harvest as abundant as my self-esteem), I 
made almost every living poet and poetaster my enemy, anc 
particularly exasperated those among the Tories. I speak o: 
the shape in which it first appeared, before time and refiectior 
had moderated its judgment. It drew upon my head all the 
personal hostility which had hitherto been held in a state o: 
suspense by the vaguer daring of the Examiner, and I have 
reason to believe that its inconsiderate, and I am bound t< 
confess, in some respects, unwarrantable levity, was the origir 
of the gravest, and far less warrantable attacks which I after- 
wards sustained from political antagonists, and which causec 
the most serious mischief to my fortunes. Let the young 






LITERARY WARFARE. 1U3 

satirist take warning ; and consider how much self-love he is 
going to wound, by the indulgence of his own. 

Not that I have to apologize to the memory of every one 
whom I attacked. I am sorry to have had occasion to diner 
with any of my fellow-creatures, knowing the mistakes to 
which we are all liable, and the circumstances that help to 
cause them. But I can only regret it, personally, in propor- 
tion to the worth or personal regret on the side of the enemy. 

The Quarterly Review, for instance, had lately been set up, 
and its editor was GifFord, the author of the Baviad and 
Mceviad. I had been invited, nay, pressed by the publisher, 
to write in the new review ; which surprised me, considering 
its politics and the great difference of my own. I was not 
aware of the little faith that was held in the politics of any 
beginner of the world; and I have no doubt that the invita- 
tion had been made at the instance of Gifford himself, of 
whom, as the dictum of a " man of vigorous learning," and 
the " first satirist of his time," I had quoted in the Critical 
Essays the gentle observation, that " all the fools in the 
kingdom seemed to have risen up with one accord, and ex- 
claimed, ' Let us write for the theatres ! ' " 

Strange must have been Gifford's feelings, when, in the 
Feast of the Poets, he found his eulogizer falling as trenchantly 
on the author of the Baviad and Ma3viad as the Baviad and 
Mo3viad had fallen on the dramatists. The Tory editor dis- 
cerned plainly enough, that if a man's politics were of no 
consideration with the Quarterly Review, provided the poli- 
tician was his critical admirer, they were very different things 
with the editor Eadical. He found also, that the new satirist 
had ceased to regard the old one as a " critical authority ; " 
and he might not have unwarrantably concluded that I had 
conceived some personal disgust against him as a man ; for 
such, indeed, was the secret of my attack. 

The reader is, perhaps, aware, that George the Fourth, 
when he was Prince of Wales, had a mistress of the name of 
Robinson. She was the wife of a man of no great character, 
had taken to the stage for a livelihood, was very handsome, 
wrote verses, and is said to have excited a tender emotion in 
the bosom of Charles Fox. The prince allured her from the 
stage, and lived with her for some years. After their sepa- 
ration, and during her decline, which took place before she 
was old, she became afflicted with rheumatism; and as she 
solaced her pains, and perhaps added to her subsistence, by 

18 



194 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

writing verses, and as her verses turned upon her affections, 
and she could not discontinue her old vein of love and senti- 
ment, she fell under the lash of this masculine and gallant 
gentleman, Mr. Gilford, who, in his Baviad and Mceviad, 
amused himself with tripping up her " crutches," particularly 
as he thought her on her way to her last home. This he con- 
sidered the climax of the fun. 

u See," exclaimed he, after a hit or two at other women, 
like a boy throwing stones in the street — 

" See Robinson forget her state, and move 
On crutches toiv'rds the grave to ' Light o' Love.' " 

This is the passage which put all the gall into anything 
which I said, then or afterwards, of Gifford, till he attacked 
myself and my friends. At least, it disposed me to think the 
worst of whatever he wrote ; and as reflection did not improve 
nor suffering; soften him, he is the only man I ever attacked, 
respecting whom I have felt no regret. 

It would be easy for me, at this distance of time, to own 
that Gifford possessed genius, had such been the case. It 
would have been easy for me at any time. But he had not a 
particle. The scourger of poetasters was himself a poetaster. 
When he had done with his whip, everybody had a right to 
take it up, and lay it over the scourgers shoulders; for 
though he had sense enough to discern glaring faults, he 
abounded in commonplaces. His satire itself, which at its 
best never went beyond smartness, was full of them. 

The reader shall have a specimen or tw T o, in order that 
Mr. Gifford may speak for himself; for his book has long 
ceased to be read. He shall see with how little a stock of his 
own a man may set up for a judge of others. 

The Baviad and Mceviad — so called from two bad poets 
mentioned by Virgil — w 7 as a satire, imitated from Persius, on 
a set of fantastic writers who had made their appearance 
under the title of Delia Cruscans. The coterie originated in 
the meeting of some of them at Florence, the seat of the 
famous Delia- Cruscan Academy. Mr. Merry, their leader, 
who was a member of that academy, and who wrote under its 
signature, gave occasion to the name. They first published 
a collection of poems, called the Florence Miscellany ', and 
then sent verses to the London newspapers, which occasioned 
an overflow of contributions in the like taste. The taste was 
as bad as can be imagined ; full of floweriness, conceits, and 



LITERACY WARFARE. 195 

affectation; and, in attempting to escape from commonplace, 
it evaporated into nonsense : — 

" Was it the shuttle of the morn 
That wove upon the cobwebb'd thorn 
Thy airy lay?" 
"Hang o'er his eye the gossamery tear." 
* Gauzy zephyrs, fluttering o'er the plain, 
On twilight's bosom drop their filmy rain." 
&c. &c. 

It was impossible that such absurdities could have had any 
lasting effect on the public taste. They would have died of 
inanition. 

His satire consists, not in a critical exposure — in showing 
why the objects of his contempt are wrong — but in simply 
asserting that they are so. He turns a commonplace of his 
own in his verses, quotes a passage from his author in a note, 
expresses his amazement at it, and thus thinks he has proved 
his case, when he has made out nothing but an overweening 
assumption at the expense of what was not worth noticing. 
11 1 was born," says he, — 

" To brand obtrusive ignorance with scorn, 
On bloated pedantry to pour my rage, 
And hiss preposterous fustian from the stage." 

What commonplace talking is that ? Here is some more of 
the same stuff : — 

" Then let your style be brief, your meaning clear, 
Nor, like Lorenzo, tire the labouring ear 
With a wild waste of words; sound without sense, 
And all the florid glare of impotence. 
Still, with your characters your language change, — 
From grave to gay, as nature dictates, range; 
Now droop in all the plaintiveness of woe, — (! !) 
Now in glad numbers light and airy flow; 
Now shake the stage with guilt's alarming tone, ( ! !) 
And make the aching bosom all your own" 

Was there ever a fonder set of complacent old phrases, 
such as any schoolboy might utter ? Yet this is the man who 
undertook to despise Charles Lamb, and to trample on Keats 
and Shelley ! 

I have mentioned the Roxburgh sale of books. I was 
standing among the bidders with my friend the late Mr. 
Barron Field, when he jogged my elbow, and said, " There is 
Gifford over the way, looking at you with such a face ! " I 
met the eyes of my beholder, and saw a little man, with a 
warped frame and a countenance between the querulous and 

13—2 



196 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

the angry, gazing at me "with, all his might. It was, truly 
enough, the satirist who could not bear to be satirized — the 
denouncer of incompetencies, who could not bear to be told 
of his own. He had now learnt, as I was myself to learn, 
what it was to taste of his own bitter medicaments ; and he 
never profited by it, for his Review spared neither age nor 
sex as long as he lived. What he did at first out of a self- 
satisfied incompetence, he did at last out of an envious and 
angry one ; and he was, all the while, the humble servant of 
power, and never expressed one word of regret for his in- 
humanity. The mixture of implacability and servility is the 
sole reason, as I have said before, why I still speak of him as 
I do. If he secretly felt regret for it, I am sorry — especially 
if he retained any love for his " Anna," whom I take to have 
been not only the good servant and friend he describes her, 
but such a one as he could wish that he had married. Why 
did he not marry her, and remain a humbler and a happier 
man ? or how was it, that the power to have any love at all 
could not teach him that other people might have feelings as 
well as himself, especially women and the sick ? 

Such were the causes of my disfavour with the Tory critics 
in England. 

To those in Scotland I gave, in like manner, the first cause 
of offence, and they had better right to complain of me ; 
though they ended, as far as regards the mode of resentment, 
in being still more in the wrong. I had taken a dislike to 
Walter Scott, on account of a solitary passage in his edition 
of Dryden — nay, on account of a single word. The word, it 
must be allowed, was an extraordinary one, and such as he 
must have regretted writing ; for a more dastardly or delibe- 
rate piece of wickedness than allowing a ship with its crew to 
go to sea, knowing the vessel to be leaky, believing it likely 
to founder, and on purpose to destroy one of the passengers, 
it is not so easy to conceive ; yet, because this was done by 
a Tory king, the relator could find no severer term for it than 
" ungenerous." Here is the passage : — 

*' His political principles (the Earl of Mul grave's) were those of a 
staunch Tory, which he maintained through his whole life; and he 
was zealous for the royal prerogative, although he had no small reason 
to complain of Charles the Second, who, to avenge himself of Mul- 
grave, for a supposed attachment to the Princess Anne, sent him to 
Tangiers, at the head of some troops, in a leaky vessel, which it was 
supposed must have perished in the voyage. Though Mulgrave was 
apprised of the danger, he scorned to shun it; and the Earl of Ply- 



LITERARY WARFARE. 197 

mouth, a favourite son of the king, generously insisted upon sharing 
it along with him. This ungenerous attempt to destroy him in the 
very act of performing his duty, with the refusal of a regiment, made 
a temporary change in Mulgrave's conduct." — Notes on Absalom and 
Achithophel in Dryderts Works, vol. ix. p. 304. 

This passage was the reason why the future great novelist 
was introduced to Apollo, in the Feast of the Poets, after a 
very irreverent fashion. 

I believe that with reference to high standards of poetry 
and criticism, superior to mere description, however lively, to 
the demands of rhyme for its own sake, to prosaical ground- 
works of style, metaphors of common property, convention- 
alities in general, and the prevalence of a material over a 
spiritual treatment, my estimate of Walter Scott's then pub- 
lications, making allowance for the manner of it, will still be 
found not far from the truth, by those who have profited by 
a more advanced age of aesthetical culture. 

There is as much difference, for instance, poetically speak- 
ing, between Coleridge's brief poem, Christabel, and all the 
narrative poems of Walter Scott, or, as Wordsworth called 
them, " novels in verse," as between a precious essence and a 
coarse imitation of it, got up for sale. Indeed, Coleridge, not 
unnaturally, though not with entire reason (for the story and 
characters in Scott were the real charm), lamented that an 
endeavour, unavowed, had been made to catch his tone, and 
had succeeded just far enough to recommend to unbounded 
popularity what had nothing in common with it. 

But though Walter Scott was no novelist at that time 
except in verse, the tone of personal assumption towards him 
in the Feast of the Poets formed a just ground of offence. 
Not that I had not as much right to differ with any man on 
any subject, as he had to differ with others ; but it would 
have become me, especially at that time of life, and in speak- 
ing of a living person, to express the difference with modesty. 
I ought to have taken care also not to fall into one of the very 
prejudices I was reproving, and think ill or well of people in 
proportion as they differed or agreed with me in politics. 
Walter Scott saw the good of mankind in a Tory or retro- 
spective point of view. I saw it from a Whig, a Eadical, or 
prospective one ; and though I still think he was mistaken, 
and though circumstances have shown that the world think so 
too, I ought to have discovered, even by the writings which I 
condemned, that he was a man of a kindly nature ; and it 



198 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HOTT. 

would have become me to have given him credit for the same 
good motives, which I arrogated exclusively for mj own side 
of the question. It is true, it might be supposed, that I 
should have advocated that side with less ardour, had I been 
more temperate in this kind of judgment ; but I do not think 
so. Or if I had, the want of ardour would probably have 
been compensated by the presence of qualities, the absence of 
which was injurious to its good effect. At all events, I am 
now of opinion, that whatever may be the immediate impres- 
sion, a cause is advocated to the most permanent advantage 
by persuasive, instead of provoking manners; and certain I 
am, that whether this be the case or not, no human being, be 
he the best and wisest of his kind, much less a confident 
young man, can be so sure of the result of his confidence, as 
to warrant the substitution of his will and pleasure in that 
direction, for the charity which befits his common modesty 
and his participation of error. 

It is impossible for me, in other respects, to regret the war 
I had with the Tories. I rejoice in it as far as I can rejoice 
at anything painful to myself and others, and I am paid for 
the consequences in what I have lived to see; nay, in the 
respect and regrets of the best of my enemies. But I am 
sorry that in aiming wounds which I had no right to give, I 
cannot deny that I brought on myself others which they had 
still less right to inflict ; and I make the amends of this con- 
fession, not only in return for what they have expressed 
themselves, but in justice to the feelings which honest men of 
all parties experience as they advance in life, and when they 
look back calmly upon their common errors. 

" I shall put this book in my pocket," said Walter Scott to 
Murray, after he had been standing a while at his counter, 
reading the Story of Rimini. 

" Pray do," said the publisher. The copy of the book was 
set down to the author in the bookseller's account as a present 
to Walter Scott. Walter Scott was beloved by his friends; 
the author of the Story of Rimini was an old offender, per- 
sonal as well as political ; and hence the fury with which they 
fell on him in their new publication. 

Every party has a right side and a wrong. The right side 
of Whiggism, Eadicalism, or the love of liberty, is the love 
of justice — the wish to see fair play to all men, and the ad- 
vancement of knowledge and competence. The wrong side is 
the wish to pull down those above us, instead of the desire of 



LITERARY WARFARE. 199 

raising those who are below. The right side of Toryism is 
the love of order and the disposition to reverence and personal 
attachment ; the wrong side is the love of power for power's 
sake, and the determination to maintain it in the teeth of all 
that is reasonable and humane. A strong spice of supersti- 
tion, generated by the habit of success, tended to confuse the 
right and wrong sides of Toryism, in minds not otherwise 
unjust or ungenerous. They seemed to imagine that heaven 
and earth would " come together," if the supposed favourites 
of Providence were to be considered as favourites no longer ; 
and hence the unbounded licence which they gave to their 
resentment, and the strange self-permission of a man like 
'Walter Scott, not only to lament over the progress of society, 
as if the future had been ordained only to carry on the past, 
but to countenance the Border-like forages of his friends into 
provinces which they had no business to invade, and to 
speculate upon still greater organizations of them, which cir- 
cumstances, luckily for his fame, prevented. I allude to the 
intended establishment of a journal, which, as it never existed, 
it is no longer necessary to name. 

Eeaders in these kindlier days 01 criticism have no concep- 
tion of the extent to which personal hostility allowed itself to 
be transported, in the periodicals of those times. Personal 
habits, appearances, connections, domesticities, nothing was 
safe from misrepresentations, begun, perhaps, in the gaiety of 
a saturnalian licence, but gradually carried to an excess which 
would have been ludicrous, had it not sometimes produced 
tragical consequences. It threatened a great many more, and 
scattered, meantime, a great deal of wretchedness among un- 
offending as well as offending persons, sometimes in proportion 
to the delicacy which hindered them from exculpating them- 
selves, and which could only have vindicated one portion of a 
family by sacrificing another. I was so caricatured, it seems, 
among the rest, upon matters great and small (for I did not 
see a tenth part of what was said of me), that persons, on 
subsequently becoming acquainted with me, sometimes ex- 
pressed their surprise at finding me no other than I was in 
lace, dress, manners, and very walk ; to say nothing of the 
conjugality which they found at my fireside, and the affection 
which I had the happiness of enjoying among my friends in 
general. I never retaliated in the same way ; first, because I 
had never been taught to respect it, even by the jests of 
Aristophanes ; secondly, because I observed the sorrow which 



200 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

it caused both to right and wrong ; thirdly, because it is im- 
possible to know the truth of any story related of a person, 
without hearing all the parties concerned ; and fourthly, 
because, while people thought me busy with politics and con- 
tention, I was almost always absorbed in my books and verses, 
and did not, perhaps, sufficiently consider the worldly conse- 
quences of the indulgence. 

To return to the Feast of the Poets. I offended all the 
critics of the old or French school by objecting to the mono- 
tony of Pope's versification, and all the critics of the new or 
German school, by laughing at Wordsworth, with whose 
writings I was then unacquainted, except through the medium 
of his deriders. On reading him for myself, I became such 
an admirer, that Lord Byron accused me of making him 
popular upon town. I had not very well pleased Lord Byron 
himself, by counting him inferior to Wordsworth. Indeed, I 
offended almost everybody whom I noticed ; some by finding 
any fault at all with them ; some, by not praising them on 
their favourite points ; some, by praising others on any point ; 
and some, I am afraid, and those amongst the most good- 
natured, by needlessly bringing them on the carpet, and 
turning their very good-nature into a subject of caricature. 
Thus I introduced Mr. Hayley, whom I need not have noticed 
at all, as he belonged to a bygone generation. He had been 
brought up in the courtesies of the old school of manners, 
which he ultra-polished and rendered caressing, after the 
fashion of my Arcadian friends of Italy ; and as the poetry of 
the Triumphs of Temper was not as vigorous in style as it was 
amiable in its moral and elegant in point of fancy, I chose to 
sink his fancy and his amiableness, and to represent him as 
nothing but an effeminate parader of phrases of endearment 
and pickthank adulation. I looked upon him as a sort of 
powder-puff of a man, with no real manhood in him, but fit 
only to suffocate people with his frivolous vanity, and be struck 
aside with contempt. I had not yet learned, that writers may 
be very " strong" and huffing on paper, while feeble on other 
points, and, vice versa, weak in their metres, while they are 
strong enough as regards muscle. I remember my astonish- 
ment, years afterwards, on finding that the " gentle Mr. Hay- 
ley," whom I had taken for 

" A puny insect, shivering at a breeze," 
was a strong-built man, famous for walking in the snow 



LITERACY WARFARE. 201 

before daylight, and possessed of an intrepidity as a horseman 
amounting to the reckless. It is not improbable that the 
feeble Hay ley, during one of his equestrian passes, could have 
snatched up the " vigorous" Gifford, and pitched him over 
the hedge into the next field. 

Having thus secured the enmity of the Tory critics north 
and south, and the indifference (to say the least of it) of the 
gentlest lookers on, it fell to the lot of the better part of my 
impulses to lose me the only counteracting influence which 
was offered me in the friendship of the Whigs. I had par- 
taken deeply of Whig indignation at the desertion of their 
party by the Prince Kegent. The Reflector contained an 
article on his Royal Highness, bitter accordingly, which ban- 
tered, among other absurdities, a famous dinner given by him 
to " one hundred and fifty particular friends." There was a 
real stream of water running down the table at this dinner, 
stocked with golden fish. It had banks of moss and bridges 
of pasteboard ; the salt-cellars were panniers borne by " golden 
asses ; " everything, in short, was as unlike the dinners now 
given by the sovereign, in point of taste and good sense, as 
effeminacy is different from womanhood ; and the Reflector, in 
a parody of the complaint of the shepherd, described how 

" Despairing, beside a clear stream, 
The bust of a cod-fish was laid; 
And while a false taste was his theme, 
A drainer supported his head." 

A day or two after the appearance of this article, I met in 
the street the late estimable Blanco White, whom I had the 
pleasure of being acquainted with. He told me of the amuse- 
ment it had given at Holland House ; and added, that Lord 
Holland would be glad to see me among his friends there, and 
that he (Blanco White) was commissioned to say so. 

I did not doubt for an instant that anything but the most 
disinterested kindness and good-nature dictated the invitation 
which was thus made to me. It was impossible, at any subse- 
quent time, that I could speak with greater respect and admi- 
ration of his lordship, than I had been in the habit of doing 
already. Never had an unconstitutional or illiberal measure 
taken place in the House of Lords, but his protest was sure to 
appear against it ; and this, and his elegant literature and re- 
putation for hospitality, had completely won my heart. At the 
same time, I did not look upon the invitation as any return for 
this enthusiasm. I considered his lordship (and now at this 



202 



AUTOBIOGEAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 



moment consider Iiim) as having been as free from every per- 
sonal motive as myself; and this absence of all suspicion, 
prospective or retrospective, enabled me to feel the more 
confident and consoled in the answer which I felt bound to 
make to his courtesy. 

I said to Mr. Blanco White, that I could not sufficiently 
express my sense of the honour that his lordship was pleased 
to do me; and there was not a man in England at wdiose 
table I should be prouder or happier to sit; and I was fortu- 
nate in having a conveyer of the invitation, who would know 
how to believe what I said, and to make a true representation 
of it; and that with almost any other person, I should fear 
to be thought guilty of immodesty and presumption, in not 
hastening to avail myself of so great a kindness; but that 
the more I admired and loved the character of Lord Holland, 
the less I dared to become personally acquainted with him ; 
that being a far weaker person than he gave me credit for 
being, it would be difficult for me to eat the mutton and 
drink the claret of such a man, without falling into any 
opinion into which his conscience might induce him to lead 
me ; and that not having a single personal acquaintance, even 
among what was called my own party (the Eadicals), his 
lordship's goodness would be the more easily enabled to put 
its kindest and most indulgent construction on the misfortune 
which I was obliged to undergo, in denying myself the delight 
of his society. 

I do not say that these w r ere the very words, but they 
convey the spirit of what I said to Mr. Blanco White; and 
I should not have doubted his giving them a correct report, 
even had no evidence of it followed. But there did ; for 
Lord Holland courteously sent me his publications, and never 
ceased, while he lived, to show me all the kindness in his 
power. 

Of high life in ordinary, it is little for me to say that I 
might have had a surfeit of it, if I pleased. Circumstances, 
had I given way to them, might have rendered half my 
existence a round of it. I might also have partaken no mean 
portion of high life extraordinary. And very charming is its 
mixture of softness and strength, of the manliness of its 
taste and the urbanity of its intercourse. I have tasted, if 
not much of it, yet some of its. very essence, and I cherish, 
and am grateful for it at this moment. What I have said, 
therefore, of Holland House, is mentioned under no feelings, 



LITERARY WARFARE. 203 

either of assumption or servility. The invitation was made, 
and declined, with an equal spirit of faith on both sides in 
better impulses. 

Far, therefore, am I from supposing, that the silence of the 
Whig critics respecting me was owing to any hostile influence 
which Lord Holland would have condescended to exercise. 
Not being among the visitors at Holland House, I dare say I 
was not thought of; or if I was thought of, I was regarded as 
a person who, in shunning Whig connection, and, perhaps, in 
persisting to advocate a reform towards which they were 
cooling, might be supposed indifferent to Whig advocacy. 
And, indeed, such was the case, till I felt the want of it. 

Accordingly, the Edinburgh Review took no notice of the 
Feast of the Poets, though my verses praised it at the 
expense of the Quarterly, and though some of the reviewers, 
to my knowledge, liked it, and it echoed the opinions of others. 
It took no notice of the pamphlet on the Folly and Danger of 
Methodism, though the opinions in it were, perhaps, identical 
with its own. And it took as little of the Reformist's Answer 
to an Article in the Edinburgh Review — a pamphlet which I 
wrote in defence of its own reforming principles, which it had 
lately taken it into its head to renounce as impracticable. Ke- 
form had been apparently given up for ever by its originators ; 
the Tories were increasing in strength every day ; and I was 
left to battle with them as I could. Little did I suppose, that 
a time would come when I should be an Edinburgh Reviewer 
myself; when its former editor, agreeably to the dictates of his 
heart, would be one of the kindest of my friends ; and when 
a cadet of one of the greatest of the Whig houses, too young 
at that time to possess more than a prospective influence, 
'would carry the reform from which his elders recoiled, and 
gift the prince-opposing Whig-Badical with a pension, under 
the gracious countenance of a queen whom the Radical loves. 
I think the Edinburgh Review might have noticed my books 
a little oftener. I am sure it would have done me a great 
deal of worldly good by it, and itself no harm in these pro- 
gressing days of criticism. But I said nothing on the subject, 
and may have been thought indifferent. 

Of Mr. Blanco White, thus brought to my recollection, a 
good deal is known in certain political and religious quarters; 
but it may be new to many readers, that he was an Anglo- 
Spaniard, who was forced to quit the Peninsula for his liberal 
opinions, and who died in his adopted country not long ago, 



204 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

after many years' endeavour to come to some positive faith 
within the Christian pale. At the time I knew him he had 
not long arrived from Spain, and was engaged, or about to be 
engaged, as tutor to the present Lord Holland. Though 
English by name and origin, he was more of the Spaniard in 
appearance, being very unlike the portrait prefixed to his 
Life and Correspondence. At least, he must have greatly 
altered from what he was when I knew him, if that portrait 
ever resembled him. He had a long pale face, with prominent 
drooping nose, anxious and somewhat staring eyes, and a 
mouth turning down at the corners. I believe there was not 
an honester man in the world, or one of an acuter intellect, 
short of the mischief that had been done it by a melancholy 
temperament and a superstitious training. It is distressing, 
in the work alluded to, to see what a torment the intellect 
may be rendered to itself by its own sharpness, in its efforts 
to make its way to conclusions, equally unnecessary to discover 
and impossible to be arrived at. 

But, perhaps, there was something naturally self-tormenting 
in the state of Mr. White's blood. The first time I met him 
at a friend's house, he was suffering under the calumnies of 
his countrymen; and though of extremely gentle manners in 
ordinary, he almost startled me by suddenly turning round, and 
saying, in one of those incorrect foreign sentences which force 
one to be relieved while they startle, " If they proceed more, 
I will go mad.' 7 

In like manner, while he was giving me the Holland-House 
invitation, and telling me of the amusement derived from the 
pathetic cod's head and shoulders, he looked so like the pisca- 
tory bust which he was describing, that with all my respect 
for his patriotism and his sorrows, I could not help partaking 
of the unlucky tendency of my countrymen to be amused, in 
spite of myself, with the involuntary burlesque. 

Mr. White, on his arrival in England, was so anxious a 
student of the language, that he noted down in a pocket-book 
every phrase which struck as remarkable. Observing the 
words " Cannon Brewery" on premises then standing in 
Knightsbridge, and taking the figure of a cannon which was 
over them, as the sign of the commodity dealt in, he put down 
as a nicety of speech, " The English brew cannon." 

Another time, seeing maid- servants walking with children 
in a nursery-garden, he rejoiced in the progeny-loving cha- 
racter of the people among whom he had come, and wrote 






THE REGENT AND THE "EXAMINER." 205 

down, " Public garden provided for nurses, in which they 
take the children to walk." 

This gentleman, who had been called " Blanco" in Spain — 
which was a translation of his family name " White," and 
who afterwards wrote an excellent English book of enter- 
taining letters on the Peninsula, under the Grseco-Spanish 
appellation of Don Leucadio Doblado (White Doubled) — was 
author of a sonnet which Coleridge pronounced to be the best 
in the English language. I know not what Mr. Wordsworth 
said on this judgment. Perhaps he wrote fifty sonnets on the 
spot to disprove it. And in truth it was a bold sentence, and 
probably spoken out of a kindly, though not conscious, spirit 
of exaggeration. The sonnet, nevertheless, is truly beautiful.* 



CHAPTEK XIII. 

THE REGENT AND THE " EXAMINER*" 

Everything having been thus prepared, by myself as well as 
by others, for a good blow at the Examiner, the ministers did 
not fail to strike it. 

There was an annual dinner of the Irish on Saint Patrick's 
Day, at which the Prince of Wales's name used to be the 
reigning and rapturous toast, as that of the greatest friend they 
possessed in the United Kingdom. He was held to be the 
jovial advocate of liberality in all things, and sponsor in par- 
ticular for concession to the Catholic claims. But the Prince 
of Wales, now become Prince Regent, had retained the Tory 
ministers of his father ; he had broken life-long engagements ; 
had violated his promises, particular as well as general, those 
to the Catholics among them; and led in toto a different poli- 
tical life from what had been expected. The name, therefore, 
w r hich used to be hailed with rapture, w r as now, at the dinner 
in question, received with hisses. 

An article appeared on the subject in the Examiner ; the 
attorney-general's eye was swiftly upon the article; and the 
result to the proprietors was two years' imprisonment, with a 
fine, to each, of five hundred pounds. I shall relate the story 
of my imprisonment a few pages onward. Much as it injured 
me, I cannot wish that I had evaded it, for I believe that it 

* It is the one beginning — 

" Mysterious night ! when our first parent knew.'* 



206 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

did good, and I should have suffered far worse in the self- 
abasement. Neither have I any quarrel, at this distance of 
time, with the Prince Eegent; for though his frivolity, his 
tergiversation, and his treatment of his wife, will not allow 
me to respect his memory, I am bound to pardon it as I do 
my own faults, in consideration of the circumstances which 
mould the character of every human being. Could I meet 
him in some odd corner of the Elysian fields, where charity 
had room for both of us, I should first apologize to him for 
having been the instrument in the hand of events for attacking 
a fellow- creature, and then expect to hear him avow as hearty a 
regret for having injured myself, and unjustly treated his wife. 
[The author repeated the article in the first edition of 
his Autobiography ; but in revising the present edition he 
marked the whole of it for omission. The greater por- 
tion, indeed, is completely out of date, as so often happens 
with political writing ; the facts, the allusions, the very turn 
of the phrases, belong to circumstances long since forgotten ; 
and the effect of the composition, even as a work of art, could 
not now be appreciated. But since so much has turned upon 
the purport of this paper, and especially upon one passage, it 
may be as well to preserve that portion. The occurrence 
which prompted the article was a public dinner on Saint 
Patrick's Day, at which the Chairman, Lord Moira, a gene- 
rous man, made not the slightest allusion to the Prince 
Eegent, and Mr. Sheridan, who manfully stood up for his 
royal friend, declaring that he still sustained the principles 
of the Prince Eegent, was saluted by angry shouts and cries 
of "Change the subject!'' The Whig Morning Chronicle 
moralized this theme; and the Morning Post } which then 
affected to be the organ of the Court, in a strain of un- 
qualified admiration, replied to the Chronicle, partly in vapid 
prose objurgation, and partly in a wretched poem, graced with 
epithets intended to be extravagantly flattering to the Prince. 
To this reply the Examiner rejoined in a paper of con- 
siderable length, analyzing the whole facts, and translating 
the language of adulation into that of truth. The close of 
the article shows its spirit and purpose, and is a fair specimen 
of Leigh Hunt's political writing at that time.] 

i( What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would 
imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies, that this ' Glory of the 
people' was the subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches ! — that 
this ' Protector of the arts ' had named a wretched foreigner his his- 



THE REGENT AND THE "EXAMINER." 207 

torical painter, in disparagement or in ignorance of the merits of his 
own countrymen ! — that this ' Mecaenas of the age' patronized not a 
single deserving writer ! — that this ' Breather of eloquence' could not 
say a few decent extempore words, if we are to judge, at least, from 
what he said to his regiment on its embarkation for Portugal ! — that 
this * Conqueror of hearts' was the disappointer of hopes! — that this 
'Exciter of desire' [bravo ! Messieurs of the Post!~\ — this 'Adonis in 
loveliness,' was a corpulent man of fifty! — in short, this delightful, 
blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true, and immortal 
prince, was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in 
disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and 
demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one 
single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity! 
" These are hard truths ; but are they not truths ? And have we 
not suffered enough — are we not now suffering bitterly — from the dis- 
gusting flatteries of which the above is a repetition? The ministers 
may talk of the shocking boldness of the press, and may throw out 
their wretched warnings about interviews between Mr. Percival and 
Sir Vicary Gibbs; but let us inform them, that such vices as have 
just been enumerated are shocking to all Englishmen who have a just 
sense of the state of Europe; and that he is a bolder man, who, in 
times like the present, dares to afford reason for the description. 
Would to God, the Examiner could ascertain that difficult, and per- 
haps undiscoverable, point which enables a public writer to keep 
clear of an appearance of the love of scandal, while he is hunting out 
the vices of those in power ! Then should one paper, at least, in this 
metropolis help to rescue the nation from the charge of silently 
encouraging what it must publicly rue; and the Sardanapalus who is 
now afraid of none but informers, be taught to shake, in the midst of 
his minions, in the very drunkenness of his heart, at the voice of 
honesty. But if this be impossible, still there is one benefit which 
truth may derive from adulation — one benefit which is favourable to 
the former in proportion to the grossness of the latter, and of which 
none of his flatterers seem to be aware — the opportunity of contra- 
dicting its assertions. Let us never forget this advantage, which 
adulation cannot help giving us ; and let such of our readers as are 
inclined to deal insincerely with the great from a false notion of 
policy and of knowledge of the world, take warning from what we 
now see of the miserable effects of courtly disguise, paltering, and 
profligacy. Flattery in any shape is unworthy a man and a gentle- 
man; but political flattery is almost a request to be made slaves. If 
we would have the great to be what they ought, we must find some 
means or other to speak of them as they are." 

This article, no doubt, was very bitter and contemptuous; 
therefore, in the legal sense of the term, very libellous; the 
more so, inasmuch as it was very true. There will be no 
question about the truth of it, at this distance of time, with 
any class of persons, unless, possibly, with some few of the 
old Tories, who may think it was a patriotic action in the 
Prince to displace the Whigs for their opponents. But I 
believe, that under all the circumstances, there are few persons 



208 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

indeed nowadays, of my class, who will not be of opinion 
that, hitter as the article was, it was more than sufficiently 
avenged by two years' imprisonment and a fine of a thousand 
pounds. For it did but express what all the world were 
feeling, with the exception of the Prince's once bitterest 
enemies, the Tories themselves, then newly become his 
friends ; and its very sincerity and rashness, had the Prince 
possessed greatness of mind to think so, might have furnished 
him such a ground for pardoning it, as would have been the 
best proof he could have given us of our having mistaken 
him, and turned us into blushing and grateful friends. An 
attempt to bribe us on the side of fear did but further disgust 
us. A free and noble waiving of the punishment would have 
bowed our hearts into regret. We should have found in it 
the evidence of that true generosity of nature paramount to 
whatsoever was frivolous or appeared to be mean, which his 
flatterers claimed for him, and which would have made us 
doubly blush for the formal virtues to which we seemed to 
be attached, when, in reality, nothing would have better 
pleased us than such a combination of the gay and the mag- 
nanimous. I say doubly blush, for I now blush at ever 
having been considered, or rather been willing to be con- 
sidered, an advocate of any sort of conventionality, unquali- 
fied by liberal exceptions and prospective enlargement ; and 
I am sure that my brother, had he been living, who was one 
of the best-natured and most indulgent of men, would have 
joined with me in making the same concession; though I am 
bound to add that, with all his indulgence of others, I have 
no reason to believe that he had ever stood in need of that 
pardon for even conventional licence, from the necessity of 
which I cannot pretend to have been exempt. 

I have spoken of an attempt to bribe us. We were given 
to understand, through the medium of a third person, but in 
a manner emphatically serious and potential, that if we would 
abstain in future from commenting upon the actions of the 
royal personage, means would be found to prevent our going 
to prison. The same offer was afterwards repeated, as far as 
the payment of a fine was concerned, upon our going thither. 
I need not add that we declined both. 

The expectation of a prison was, in one respect, very 
formidable to me ; for I had been a long time in a bad state 
of health. I was suffering under the worst of those hypo- 
chondriacal attacks which I have described in a former 



THE REGEXT AXD THE " EXAMINER." 209 

chapter; and when notice was given that we were to be 
brought up for judgment, I had just been advised by the 
physician to take exercise every day on horseback, and go 
down to the sea-side. I was resolved, however, to do no 
disgrace either to the courage which I really possessed, or to 
the example set me by my excellent brother. I accordingly 
put my countenance in its best trim; I made a point of 
wearing my best apparel; and descended into the legal arena 
to be sentenced gallantly. As an instance of the imagination 
which I am accustomed to mingle with everything, I was at 
that time reading a little work, to which Milton is indebted, 
the Comus of Erycius Puteanus ; and this, which is a satire 
on " Bacchuses and their revellers," I pleased myself with 
having in my pocket. 

It is necessary, on passing sentence for a libel, to read over 
again the words that composed it. This was the business of 
Lord Ellenborough, who baffled the attentive audience in a 
very ingenious manner by affecting every instant to hear a 
noise, and calling upon the officers of the court to prevent 
it. Mr. Garrow, the attorney-general (who had succeeded 
Sir Vicary Gibbs at a very cruel moment, for the indictment 
had been brought by that irritable person, and was the first 
against us which took effect), behaved to us with a politeness 
that was considered extraordinary. Not so Mr. Justice Grose, 
who delivered the sentence. To be didactic and old-womanish 
seemed to belong to his nature ; but to lecture us on pander- 
ing to the public appetite for scandal was what we could not 
so easily bear. My brother, as I had been the writer, expected 
me, perhaps, to be the spokesman; and speak I certainly should 
have done, had I not been prevented by the dread of that 
hesitation in my speech to which I had been subject when a 
boy, and the fear of which (perhaps, idly, for I hesitated at 
that time least among strangers, and very rarely do so at all) 
has been the main cause why I have appeared and acted in 
public less than any other public man. There is reason to think 
that Lord Ellenborough was still less easy than ourselves. 
He knew that we were acquainted with his visits to Carlton- 
house and Brighton (sympathies not eminently decent in a 
judge), and with the good things which he had obtained for 
his kinsmen ; and we could not help preferring our feelings 
at the moment to those which induced him to keep his eyes 
fixed on his papers, which he did almost the whole time 
of our being in court, never turning them once to the place 

14 



210 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

on which we stood. There were divers other points too, on 
which he had some reason to fear that we might choose to 
return the lecture of the bench. He did not even look at us 
when he asked, in the course of his duty, whether it was our 
wish to make any remarks ? I answered, that we did not 
wish to make any there ; and Mr. Justice Grose proceeded to 
pass sentence. At the sound of two years' imprisonment in 
separate gaols, my brother and myself instinctively pressed 
each other's arm. It was a heavy blow; but the pressure 
that acknowledged it encouraged the resolution to bear it; 
and I do not believe that either of us interchanged a word 
afterwards on the subject. We knew that we had the respect 
of each other, and that we stood together in the hearts of the 
people. 

Just before our being brought up for judgment, the friendly 
circumstance took place on the part of Mr. Perry, of the Morning 
Chronicle, to which allusion has been made in the eleventh 
chapter, and which I forgot to supply in the first edition of 
this work. It was an offer made us to give Whig sanc- 
tion, and therefore certain and immediate influence, to the 
announcement of a manuscript for publication, connected with 
some important state and court secrets, and well known and 
dreaded by the Eegent, under the appellation of The Booh. 
I forget whether Mr. Perry spoke of its appearance, or of its 
announcement only; but the offer was made for the express 
purpose of saving us from going to prison. We heartily 
thanked the kind man; but knowing that what it is very 
proper sometimes, and handsome for persons to offer, it may 
not be equally so for other persons to accept, and not liking 
to owe our deliverance to a threat or a ruse de guerre, we 
were " romantic," and declined the favour. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



IMPEISOJOIE^T. 






We parted in hackney-coaches to our respective abodes, 
accompanied by two tipstaves apiece, and myself by my 
friend Barron Field. 

The tipstaves prepared me for a singular character in my 
gaoler. His name was Ives. I was told he was a very self- 
willed personage, not the more accommodating for being in a 



IMPRISONMENT. 211 

bad state of health; and that he called everybody Mister. 
" In short," said one of the tipstaves, "he is one as may be 
led, but he'll never be druv" 

The sight of the prison-gate and the high wall was a 
dreary business. I thought of my horseback and the downs 
of Brighton ; but congratulated myself, at all events, that I 
had come thither with a good conscience. After waiting in 
the prison-yard as long as if it had been the anteroom of a 
minister, I was ushered into the presence of the great man. 
He was in his parlour, which was decently furnished, and he 
had a basin of broth before him, which he quitted on my 
appearance, and rose with much solemnity to meet me. He 
seemed about fifty years of age. He had a white night-cap 
on, as if he was going to be hanged, and a great red face, which 
looked as if he had been hanged already, or were ready to 
burst with blood. Indeed, he was not allowed by his physi- 
cian to speak in a tone above a whisper. 

The first thing which this dignified person said was, 
11 Mister, I'd ha' given a matter of a hundred pounds, that 
you had not come to this place — a hundred pounds ! " The 
emphasis which he had laid on the word "hundred" was 
ominous. 

I forgot what I answered. I endeavoured to make the 
, best of the matter ; but he recurred over and over again to 
the hundred pounds ; and said he wondered, for his part, 
what the Government meant by sending me there, for the 
prison was not a prison fit for a gentleman. He often 
repeated this opinion afterwards, adding, with a peculiar ncd 
of his head, " And, Mister, they knows it." 

I said, that if a gentleman deserved to be sent to prison, he 

ought not to be treated with a greater nicety than any one 

i else : upon which he corrected me, observing very properly 

i (though, as the phrase is, it was one word for the gentleman 

I and two for the letter of prison-lodgings), that a person who 

i had been used to a better mode of living than " low people" 

was not treated with the same justice, if forced to lodge 

exactly as they did. 

I told him his observation was very true ; which gave him 
a favourable opinion of my understanding; for I had many 
occasions of remarking, that he looked upon nobody as his 
superior, speaking even of members of the royal family as 
. persons whom he knew very well, and whom he estimated at 
no higher rate than became him. One royal duke had 

14—2 



212 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

lunched in his parlour, and another he had laid under some 
polite obligation. " They knows me," said he, " very well, 
Mister ; and, Mister, I knows them." This concluding sen- 
tence he uttered with great particularity and precision. 

He was not proof, however, against a Greek Pindar, which 
he happened to light upon one day among my books. Its 
unintelligible character gave him a notion that he had got 
somebody to deal with, who might really know something 
which he did not. Perhaps the gilt leaves and red morocco 
binding had their share in the magic. The upshot was, that 
he always showed himself anxious to appear well with me, as 
a clever fellow, treating me with great civility on all occasions 
but one, when I made him very angry by disappointing him 
in a money amount. The Pindar was a mystery that stag- 
gered him. I remember very well, that giving me a long 
account one day of something connected with his business, he 
happened to catch with his eye the shelf that contained it, 
and, whether he saw it or not, abruptly finished by observing, 
"But, Mister, you knows all these things as well as I do." 

Upon the whole, my new acquaintance was as strange a 
person as I ever met with. A total want of education, toge- 
ther with a certain vulgar acuteness, conspired to render him 
insolent and pedantic. Disease sharpened his tendency to fits 
of passion, which threatened to suffocate him ; and then in 
his intervals of better health he would issue forth, with his 
cock-up-nose and his hat on one side, as great a fop as a 
jockey. I remember his coming to my rooms, about the 
middle of my imprisonment, as if on purpose to insult over 
my ill health with the contrast of his convalescence, putting his 
arms in a gay manner a-kimbo, and telling me I should never 
live to go out, whereas he was riding about as stout as ever, 
and had just been in the country. He died before I left prison. 

The wovd. jail, in deference to the way in which it is some- 
times spelt, this accomplished individual pronounced gole; 
and Mr. Brougham he always spoke of as Mr. Bruffam. He 
one day apologized for this mode of pronunciation, or rather 
gave a specimen of vanity and self-will, which will show the 
reader the high notions a jailer may entertain of himself. " I 
find," said he, "that they calls him Broom; but, Mister" 
(assuming a look from which there was to be no appeal), "/ 
calls him Bruffam ! " 

Finding that my host did not think the prison fit for me, I 
asked if he could let me have an apartment in his house. He 



IMPRISONMENT. 213 

pronounced it impossible ; which was a trick to enhance the 
price. I could not make an offer to please him; and he 
stood out so long, and, as he thought, so cunningly, that he 
subsequently overreached himself by his trickery, as the 
reader will see. His object was to keep me among the 
prisoners, till he could at once sicken me of the place, and 
get the permission of the magistrates to receive me into his 
house; which was a thing he reckoned upon as a certainty. 
He thus hoped to secure himself in all quarters ; for his 
vanity was almost as strong as his avarice. He was equally 
fond of getting money in private, and of the approbation of 
the great men whom he had to deal with in public ; and it so 
happened, that there had been no prisoner, above the poorest 
condition, before my arrival, with the exception of Colonel 
Despard. From abusing the prison, he then suddenly fell to 
speaking well of it, or rather of the room occupied by the 
colonel; and said, that another corresponding with it would 
make me a capital apartment. " To be sure," said he, " there 
is nothing but bare walls, and I have no bed to put in it." I 
replied, that of course I should not be hindered from having 
my own bed from home. He said, "No; and if it rains," 
observed he, " you have only to put up with want of light 
for a time." " What ! " exclaimed I, " are there no win- 
dows?" " Windows, Mister ! " cried he; " no windows in a 
prison of this sort; no glass, Mister: but excellent shutters." 

It was finally agreed, that I should sleep for a night or two 
in a garret of the gaoler's house, till my bed could be got 
ready in the prison and the windows glazed. A dreary even- 
ing followed, which, however, let me completely into the 
man's character, and showed him in a variety of lights, some 
ludicrous, and others as melancholy. There was a full-length 
portrait in the room, of a little girl, dizened out in her best. 
This, he told me, was his daughter, whom he had disinherited 
for her disobedience. I tried to suggest a few reflections, 
capable of doing her service ; but disobedience, I found, was 
an offence doubly irritating to his nature, on account of his 
sovereign habits as a gaoler ; and seeing his irritability likely 
to inflame the plethora of his countenance, I desisted. Though 
not allowed to speak above a whisper, he was extremely will- 
ing to talk ; but at an early hour I pleaded my own state of 
health, and retired to bed. 

On taking possession of my garret, I was treated with a 
piece of delicacy, which I never should have thought of find- 



214 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUXT. 

ing in a prison. When I first entered its walls, I had been 
received by the under-gaoler, a man who seemed an epitome 
of all that was forbidding in his office. He was short and 
very thick, had a hook-nose, a great severe countenance, and 
a bunch of keys hanging on his arm. A friend stopped short 
at sight of him, and said, in a melancholy tone, " And this 
is the gaoler ! " 

Honest old Cave ! thine outside would have been unworthy 
of thee, if upon further acquaintance I had not found it a 
very hearty outside — ay, and in my eyes, a very good-looking 
one, and as fit to contain the milk of human kindness that 
was in thee, as the husk of a -cocoa. To show by one speci- 
men the character of this man — I could never prevail on him 
to accept any acknowledgment of his kindness, greater than 
a set of tea-things, and a piece or two of old furniture, which 
I could not well carry away. I had, indeed, \ho, pleasure of 
leaving him in possession of a room which I had papered; 
but this was a thing unexpected, and which neither of us had 
supposed could be done. Had I been a prince, I would have 
forced on him a pension; being a journalist, I made him accept 
an Examiner weekly, which he lived for some years to relish 
his Sunday pipe with. 

This man, in the interval between my arrival and my 
introduction to the head-gaoler, had found means to give me 
further information respecting my condition, and to express 
the interest he took in it. I thought little of his offers at the 
time. He behaved with the greatest air of deference to his 
principal; moving as fast as his body would allow him, to 
execute his least intimation ; and holding the candle to him 
while he read, with an obsequious zeal. But he had spoken 
to his wife about me, and his wife I found to be as great a 
curiosity as himself. Both were more like the romantic 
gaolers drawn in some of our modern plays, than real Horse- 
monger-iane palpabilities. The wife, in her person, was as 
light and fragile as the husband was sturdy. She had the 
nerves of a fine lady, and yet went through the most unplea- 
sant duties with the patience of a martyr. Her voice and 
look seemed to plead for a softness like their own, as if a loud 
i reply would have shattered her. Ill-health had made her a 
\ Methodist, but this did not hinder her from sympathizing 
with an invalid who was none, or from loving a husband who 
was as little of a saint as need be. Upon the whole, such an 
extraordinary couple, so apparently unsuitable, and yet so 



IMPRISCEDIENT. 2 1 5 

fitted for one another ; so apparently vulgar on one side, and 
yet so naturally delicate on both ; so misplaced in their situa- 
tion, and yet for the good of others so admirably put there, I 
have never met with before or since. 

It was the business of this woman to lock me up in my 
garret; but she did it so softly the first night, that I knew 
nothing of the matter. The night following, I thought I 
heard a gentle tampering with the lock. I tried it, and found 
it fastened. She heard me as she was going down-stairs, and 
said the next day, " Ah, sir, I thought I should have turned 
the key so as for you not to hear it; but I found you did." 
The whole conduct of this couple towards us, from first to 
last, was of a piece with this singular delicacy. 

My bed was shortly put up, and I slept in my new room. 
It was on an upper story, and stood in a corner of the quad- 
rangle, on the right hand as you enter the prison-gate. The 
windows (which had now been accommodated with glass, in 
addition to their "excellent shutters") were high up, and 
barred ; but the room was large and airy, and there was a 
fireplace. It was intended to be a common room for the 
prisoners on that story ; but the cells were then empty. The 
cells were ranged on either side of the arcade, of which the 
story is formed, and the room opened at the end of it. At 
night-time the door was locked ; then another on the top 
of the staircase, then another on the middle of the stair- 
case, then a fourth at the bottom, a fifth that shut up the 
little yard belonging to that quarter, and how many more, 
before you got out of the gates, I forget : but I do not ex- 
aggerate when I say there were ten or eleven. The first 
night I slept there, I listened to them, one after the other, till 
the weaker part of my heart died within me. Every fresh 
turning of the key seemed a malignant insult to my love of 
liberty. I was alone, and away from my family ; I, who to 
this day have never slept from home above a dozen weeks in 
my life. Furthermore, the reader will bear in mind that I 
was ill. With a great flow of natural spirits, I was subject 
to fits of nervousness, which had latterly taken a more con- 
tinued shape. I felt one of them coming on, and having 
learned to anticipate and break the force of it by exercise, I 
took a stout walk by pacing backwards and forwards for the 
space of three hours. This threw me into a state in which 
rest, for rest's sake, became pleasant. I got hastily into bed, 
and slept without a dream till morning. 



216 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HOTT. 

By the way, I never dreamt of prison but twice all the 
time I was there, and my dream was the same on both occa- 
sions. I fancied I was at the theatre, and that the whole 
house looked at me in surprise, as much as to say, " How 
could he get out of prison? " 

I saw my wife for a few minutes after I entered the gaol, 
but she was not allowed on that day to stop longer. The 
next day she was with me for some hours. To say that she 
never reproached me for these and the like taxes upon our 
family prospects, is to say little. A world of comfort for me 
was in her face. There is a note in the fifth volume of 
my Spenser ', which I was then reading, in these words: — 
" February 4th, 1813. " The line to which it refers is this : — 

"Much dearer be the things which come through hard distresse." 

I now applied to the magistrates for permission to have 
my wife and children constantly with me, which was granted. 
Not so my request to move into the gaoler's house. Mr. 
Holme Sumner, on occasion of a petition from a subsequent 
prisoner, told the House of Commons that my room had a 
view over the Surrey hills, and that I was very well content 
with it. I could not feel obliged to him for this postliminous 
piece of enjoyment, especially when I remembered that he 
had done all in his power to prevent my removal out of the 
room, precisely (as it appeared to us) because it looked upon 
nothing but the felons, and because I was not contented. In 
fact, you could not see out of the windows at all, without 
getting on a chair ; and then, all that you saw w r as the 
miserable men whose chains had been clanking from daylight. 
The perpetual sound of these chains wore upon my spirits in 
a manner to which my state of health allowed me reasonably 
to object. The yard, also, in which I took exercise, was 
very small. The gaoler proposed that I should be allowed to 
occupy apartments in his house, and walk occasionally in the 
prison garden; adding, that I should certainly die if I did 
not ; and his opinion was seconded by that of the medical 
man. Mine host was sincere in this, if in nothing else. Tell- 
ing us, one day, how warmly he had put it to the magistrates, 
and how he insisted that I should not survive, he turned 
round upon me, and, to the doctor's astonishment, added, 
" Nor, Mister, will you." I believe it was the opinion of 
many; but Mr. Holme Sumner argued otherwise; perhaps 
from his own sensations, which were sufficiently iron. 



5 

; 



IMPRISONMENT. 217 

Perhaps he concluded, also, like a proper old Tory, that if 
I did not think fit to flatter the magistrates a little, and play 
the courtier, my wants could not be very great. At all 
events, he came up one day with the rest of them, and after 
bowing to my wife, and piteously pinching the cheek of an 
infant in her arms, went down and did all he could to prevent 
our being comfortably situated. 

The doctor then proposed that I should be removed into the 
prison infirmary ; and this proposal was granted. Infirmary 
had, I confess, an awkward sound, even to my ears. I fancied 
a room shared with other sick persons, not the best fitted for 
companions; but the good-natured doctor (his name was 
Dixon) undeceived me. The infirmary was divided into four 
wards, with as many small rooms attached to them. The two 
upper wards were occupied, but the two on the floor had never 
been used: and one of these, not very providently (for I had 
not yet learned to think of money), I turned into a noble room. 
I papered the walls with a trellis of roses; I had the ceiling 
coloured with clouds and sky; the barred windows I screened 
with Venetian blinds ; and when my bookcases were set up 
with their busts, and flowers and a pianoforte made their ap- 
pearance, perhaps there was not a handsomer room on that 
side the water. I took a pleasure, when a stranger knocked 
at the door, to see him come in and stare about him. The 
surprise on issuing from the Borough, and passing through 
the avenues of a gaol, was dramatic. Charles Lamb declared 
there was no other such room, except in a fairy tale. 

But I possessed another surprise; which was a garden. 
There was a little yard outside the room, railed off from an- 
other belonging to the neighbouring ward. This yard I shut 
in with green palings, adorned it with a trellis, bordered it with 
a thick bed of earth from a nursery, and even contrived to 
have a grass-plot. The earth I filled with flowers and young 
trees. There was an apple-tree, from which we managed to 
get a pudding the second year. As to my flowers, they were 
allowed to be perfect. Thomas Moore, who came to see me 
with Lord Byron, told me he had seen no such heart's-ease. I 
bought the Parnaso Italiano while in prison, and used often 
to think of a passage in it, while looking at this miniature 
piece of horticulture : — 

u Mio picciol orto, 
A me sei vigna, e campo, e selva, e prato." — Baldi. 

" My little garden, 
To me thou'rt vineyard, field, and meadow, and wood." 



218 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUXT. 

Here I wrote and read in fine weather, sometimes under an 
awning. In autumn, my trellises were hung with scarlet-run- 
ners, which added to the flowery investment. I used to shut 
my eyes in my arm-chair, and affect to think myself hundreds 
of miles off. 

But my triumph was in issuing forth of a morning. A 
wicket out of the garden led into the large one belonging to 
the prison. The latter was only for vegetables ; but it con- 
tained a cherry-tree, which I saw twice in blossom. I parcelled 
out the ground in my imagination into favourite districts. I 
made a point of dressing myself as if for a long walk ; and 
then, putting on my gloves, and taking my book under my 
arm, stepped forth, requesting my wife not to wait dinner if I 
was too late. My eldest little boy, to whom Lamb addressed 
some charming verses on the occasion, was my constant com- 
panion, and we used to play all sorts of juvenile games to- 
gether. It was, probably, in dreaming of one of these games 
(but the words had a more touching effect on my ear) that 
he exclaimed one night in his sleep, "No : I'm not lost; I'm 
found." Neither he nor I were very strong at that time; but 
I have lived to see him a man of eight and forty ; and where- 
ever he is found, a generous hand and a great understanding 
will be found together.* 

I entered prison the 3rd of February, 1813, and removed 
to my new apartments the 16th of March, happy to get out of 
the noise of the chains. When I sat amidst my books, and 
saw the imaginary sky overhead, and my paper roses about 
me, I drank in the quiet at my ears, as if they were thirsty. 
The little room was my bedroom. I afterwards made the two 

* [A kind relative supplies an anecdote of this period. " Mrs. Leigh 
Hunt, having occasion to make some purchases in town, went, accom- 
panied by her sister, and by this little boy, then in petticoats. She 
returned in a coach; and when it stopped at the prison gates, the 
driver opened the coach-door, and, apologizing for the liberty he was 
taking, said that, as it seemed unlikely that ladies should be visiting 
any one else in that prison, he presumed we came to see Mr. Leigh 
Hunt. When answered that he spoke to Mrs. Hunt, he became 
agitated, asked her if that was her child, and, learning that it 
was, he caught the child up in his arms and kissed it passionately. 
He explained his agitation by saying, that what Mr. Leigh Hunt had 
said about military flogging, had been the means of saving his son 
from the infliction ; and that he should for ever bless his name. He 
would not hear of taking any payment. This circumstance was 
naturally most grateful to Mr. Leigh Hunt's feelings. He had 
suffered for his advocacy of the soldier's cause ; but he had not 
suffered in vain.''] 






IMPRISONMENT. 219 

rooms change characters, when my wife lay in. Permission 
for her continuance with me at that period was easily obtained 
of the magistrates, among whom a new-comer made his ap- 
pearance. This was another good-natured man, Lord Leslie, 
afterwards Earl of Kothes.* He heard me with kindness ; and 
his actions did not belie his countenance. My eldest girl 
(now, alas ! no more) was born in prison. She was beautiful, 
and for the greatest part of an existence of thirty years, she 
was happy. She was christened Mary after my mother, and 
Florimel after one of Spenser's heroines. But Mary we called 
her. Never shall I forget my sensations when she came into 
the world ; for I was obliged to play the physician myself, the 
hour having taken us by surprise. But her mother found 
many unexpected comforts : and diuing the whole time of her 
confinement, which happened to be in very fine weather, the 
garden door was set open, and she looked upon trees and 
flowers. A thousand recollections rise within me at every 
fresh period of my imprisonment, such as I cannot trust my- 
self with dwelling upon. 

These rooms, and the visits of my friends, were the bright 
side of my captivity. I read verses without end, and wrote 
almost as many. I had also the pleasure of hearing that my 
brother had found comfortable rooms in Coldbath-fields, and 
a host who really deserved that name as much as a gaoler 
could. The first year of my imprisonment was a long pull 
up-hill; but never was metaphor so literally verified, as by 
the sensation at the turning of the second. In the first year, 
all the prospect was that of the one coming : in the second, 
the days began to be scored off, like those of children at school 
preparing for a holiday. When I was fairly settled in my new 
apartments, the gaoler could hardly give sufficient vent to his 
spleen at my having escaped his clutches, his astonishment 
was so great. Besides, though I treated him handsomely, he 
had a little lurking fear of the Examiner upon him ; so he 
contented himself with getting as much out of me as he could, 
and boasting of the grand room which he would fain have pre- 
vented my enjoying. 

My friends were allowed to be with me till ten o'clock at 
night, when the imder-turnkey, a young man with his lantern, 
and much ambitious gentility of deportment, came to see them 
out. I believe we scattered an urbanity about the prison, till 

* George William, twelfth earl of that name. He died a few years 
afterwards. 



220 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

then unknown. Even William Hazlitt, who there first did me 
the honour of a visit, would stand interchanging amenities at 
the threshold, which I had great difficulty in making him pass. 
I know not which kept his hat off with the greater pertinacity 
of deference, I to the diffident cutter-up of Tory dukes and 
kings, or he to the amazing prisoner and invalid who issued 
out of a bower of roses. There came my old friends and 
school-fellows, Pitman, whose wit and animal spirits have still 
kept him alive ; Mitchell, now no more, who translated Aristo- 
phanes; and Barnes, gone too, who always reminded me of 
Fielding. It was he that introduced me to the late Mr. Thomas 
Alsager, the kindest of neighbours, a man of business, who 
contrived to be a scholar and a musician. Alsager loved his 
leisure, and yet would start up at a moment's notice to do the 
least of a prisoner's biddings. 

My now old friend, Cowden Clarke, with his ever young 
and wise heart, was good enough to be his own introducer, 
paving his way, like a proper visitor of prisons, with baskets 
of fruit. 

The Lambs came to comfort me in all weathers, hail or sun- 
shine, in daylight and in darkness, even in the dreadful frost 
and snow of the beginning of 1814. 

My physician, curiously enough, was Br. Knighton (after- 
wards Sir William), who had lately become physician to the 
prince. He, therefore, could not, in decency, visit me under 
the circumstances, though he did again afterwards, never fail- 
ing in the delicacies due either to his great friend or to his 
small. Meantime, another of his friends, the late estimable 
Dr. Gooch, came to me as his substitute, and he came often. 

Great disappointment and exceeding viciousness may talk 
as they please of the badness of human nature. For my part, 
I am now in my seventy -fourth year, and I have seen a good 
deal of the world, the dark side as well as the light, and I say 
that human nature is a very good and kindly thing, and capable 
of all sorts of virtues. Art thou not a refutation of all that 
can be said against it, excellent Sir John Swinburne ? another 
friend whom I made in prison, and who subsequently cheered 
some of my greatest passes of adversity. Health, as well as 
sense and generosity, has blessed him ; and he retains a young 
heart at the age of ninety-four. 

To evils I have owed some of my greatest blessings. It was 
imprisonment that brought me acquainted with my friend of 
friends, Shelley. I had seen little of him before; but he wrote 



IMPRISONMENT. 221 

to me, making me a princely offer, which at that time I stood 
in no need of. 

Some other persons, not at all known to us, offered to raise 
money enough to pay the fine of 1,000/. We declined it, with 
proper thanks; and it became us to do so. But, as far as my 
own feelings were concerned, I have no merit ; for I was de- 
stitute, at that time, of even a proper instinct with regard to 
money. It was not long afterwards that I was forced to call 
upon friendship for its assistance ; and nobly (as I shall show 
by and by) was it afforded me. 

To some other friends, near and dear, I may not even return 
thanks in this place for a thousand nameless attentions, which 
they make it a business of their existence to bestow on those 
they love. I might as soon thank my own heart. But one 
or two others, whom I have not seen for years, and who by 
some possibility (if, indeed, they ever think it worth their 
while to fancy anything on the subject) might suppose them- 
selves forgotten, 1 may be suffered to remind of the pleasure 
they gave me. M. S. [Michael Slegg ?], who afterwards saw 
us so often near London, has long, I hope, been enjoying the 
tranquillity he so richly deserved ; and so, I trust, is C. S. 
[Caroline Scott?], whose face, or rather something like it 
(for it was not easy to match her own), I continually met with 
afterwards in the land of her ancestors. Her veil, and her 
baskets of flowers, used to come through the portal, like light. 

I must not omit a visit from the venerable Bentham, who 
was justly said to unite, the wisdom of a sage with the sim- 
plicity of a child. I had had the honour of one from him 
before my imprisonment, when he came, he said, to make my 
acquaintance, because the Examiner had spoken well of a 
new weekly paper. On the present occasion he found me 
playing at battledore, in which he took a part; and, with his 
usual eye towards improvement, suggested an amendment in 
the constitution of shuttlecocks. I remember the surprise of 
the governor at his local knowledge and his vivacity. " Why, 
Mister," said he, " his eye is everywhere at once." 

All these comforts were embittered by unceasing ill-health, 
and by certain melancholy reveries, which the nature of the 
place did not help to diminish. During the first six weeks 
the sound of the felons' chains, mixed with what I took for 
horrid execrations or despairing laughter, was never out of 
my ears. When I went into the infirmary, which stood 
between the gaol and the prison walls, gallowses were occa- 



222 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUKT. 

sionally put in order by the side of my windows, and after- 
wards set up over the prison gates, where they remained 
visible. The keeper one day, with an air of mystery, took 
me into the upper ward, for the purpose, he said, of gratify- 
ing me with a view of the country from the roof. Some- 
thing prevented his showing me this; but the spectacle he 
did show me I shall never forget. It was a stout country 
girl, sitting in an absorbed manner, her eyes fixed on the 
fire. She was handsome, and had a little hectic spot in either 
cheek, the effect of some gnawing emotion. He told me, in 
a whisper, that she was there for the murder of her bastard 
child. I could have knocked the fellow down for his un- 
feelingness in making a show of her; but, after all, she did 
not see us. She heeded us not. There was no object before 
her but what produced the spot in her cheek. The gallows, 
on which she was executed, must have been brought out 
within her hearing; but, perhaps, she heard that as little. 

To relieve the reader's feelings I will here give him another 
instance of the delicacy of my friend the under-gaoler. He 
always used to carry up her food to this poor girl himself ; be- 
cause, as he said, he did not think it a fit task for younger men. 

This was a melancholy case. In general, the crimes were 
not of such a staggering description, nor did the criminals 
appear to take their situation to heart. I found by degrees 
that fortune showed fairer play than I had supposed to all 
classes of men, and that those who seemed to have most reason 
to be miserable were not always so. Their criminality was 
generally proportioned to their want of thought. My friend 
Cave, who had become a philosopher by the force of his 
situation, said to me one day when a new batch of criminals 
came in, "Poor ignorant wretches, sir! " At evening, when 
they went to bed, I used to stand in the prison garden, listen- 
ing to the cheerful songs with which the felons entertained 
one another. The beaters of hemp were a still merrier race. 
Doubtless the good hours and simple fare of the prison con- 
tributed to make the blood of its inmates run better, particu- 
larly those who were forced to take exercise. At last, I used 
to pity the debtors more than the criminals ; yet even the 
debtors had their gay parties and jolly songs. Many a time 
(for they were my neighbours) have I heard them roar out 
the old ballad in Beaumont and Fletcher : — 

" He that drinks, and goes to bed sober, 
Falls as the leaves do, and dies in October." 



DtPEISONMEKT. 223 

To say the truth, there was an obstreperousness in their 
mirth that looked more melancholy than the thoughtlessness 
of the lighter-feeding felons. 

On the 3rd of February, 1815, I was free. When my 
family, the preceding summer, had been obliged to go down 
to Brighton for their health, I felt ready to dash my head 
against the wall at not being able to follow them. I would 
sometimes sit in my chair with this thought upon me, till the 
agony of my impatience burst out at every pore. I would 
not speak of it if it did not enable me to show how this kind 
of suffering may be borne, and in what sort of way it termi- 
nates. I learnt to prevent it by violent exercise. All fits of 
nervousness ought to be anticipated as much as possible with 
exercise. Indeed, a proper healthy mode of life would save 
most people from these effeminate ills, and most likely cure 
even their inheritors. 

It was now thought that I should dart out of my cage 
like a bird, and feel no end in the delight of ranging. But, 
partly from ill-health, and partly from habit, the day of my 
liberation brought a good deal of pain with it. An illness of 
a long standing, which required very different treatment, had 
by this time been burnt in upon me by the iron that enters 
into the soul of the captive, wrap it in flowers as he may; 
and I am ashamed to say, that after stopping a little at the 
house of my friend Alsager, I had not the courage to continue 
looking at the shoals of people passing to and fro, as the 
coach drove up the Strand. The wdiole business of life seemed 
a hideous impertinence. The first pleasant sensation I expe- 
rienced was when the coach turned into the New Eoad, and 
I beheld the old hills of my affection standing where they used 
to do, and breathing me a welcome. 

It was very slowly that I recovered anything like a sensa- 
tion of health. The bitterest evil I suffered was in conse- 
quence of having been confined so long in one spot. The 
habit stuck to me on my return home in a very extraordi- 
nary manner ; and, I fear, some of my friends thought me 
ungrateful. They did me an injustice ; but it was not their 
fault ; nor could I wish them the bitter experience which 
alone makes us acquainted with the existence of strange 
things. This weakness I outlived; but I have never thoroughly 
recovered the shock given my constitution. My natural 
spirits, however, have always struggled hard to see me reason- 
ably treated. Many things give me exquisite pleasure which 



224: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

seem to affect other men in a very minor degree ; and I 
enjoyed, after all, such happy moments with my friends, even 
in prison, that in the midst of the beautiful climate which I 
afterwards visited, I was sometimes in doubt whether I would 
not rather have been in gaol than in Italy. 



CHAPTER XV. 

FREE AGAIN. — SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 

On leaving prison I went to live in the Edgeware Road, 
because my brother's house was in the neighbourhood. 
When we met, we rushed into each other's arms, and tears 
of manhood bedewed our cheeks. 

Not that the idea of the Prince Regent had anything to do 
with such grave emotions. His Royal Highness continued to 
affect us with anything but solemnity, as we took care to 
make manifest in the Examiner. We had a hopeful and 
respectful word for every reigning prince but himself: and I 
must say, that with the exception of the Emperor Alexander, 
not one of them deserved it. 

The lodging which my family occupied (for the fine, and 
the state of my health, delayed my resumption of a house) . 
was next door to a wealthy old gentleman, who kept a hand- 
some carriage, and spoke very bad grammar. My landlord, 
who was also a dignified personage after his fashion, pointed 
him out to me one day as he was getting into his carriage; 
adding, in a tone amounting to the awful, " He is the greatest 
plumber in London." The same landlord, who had a splendid 
turn for anti-climax, and who had gifted his children with 
names proportionate to his paternal sense of what became 
him, called out to one of them from his, parlour window, 
" You, sir, there — Maximilian — come out of the gutter.' 7 
He was a good-natured sort of domineering individual ; and 
would say to his wife, when he went out, " Damn it, my love, 
I insist on having the pudding." 

In this house Lord Byron continued the visits which he 
made me in prison. Unfortunately, I was too ill to return 
them. He pressed me very much to go to the theatre with 
him ; but illness, and the dread of committing my critical 
independence, alike prevented me. His lordship was one of a 



FREE AGAIN.— SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 225 

nanagement that governed Drury-lane Theatre at that time, 
md that were not successful. He got nothing by it but petty 
vexations and a good deal of scandal. 

Lord Byron's appearance at that time was the finest I ever 
iaw it. He was fatter than before his marriage, but only just 
enough so to complete the elegance of his person; and the 
ton of his head and countenance had a spirit and elevation 
n it which, though not unmixed with disquiet, gave him 
iltogether a very noble look. His dress, which was black, 
with white trousers, and which he wore buttoned close over 
:he body, completed the succinctness and gentlemanliness of 
ais appearance. I remember one day, as he stood looking 
DUt of the window, he resembled, in a lively manner, the 
portrait of him by Phillips, by far the best that has appeared: 
I mean, the best of him at his best time of life, and the most 
like him in features as well as expression. He sat one morn- 
ing so long that Lady Byron sent up twice to let him know 
she was waiting. Her ladyship used to go on in the carriage 
to Henderson's nursery-ground, to get flowers. I had not the 
honour of knowing her, nor ever saw her but once, when I 
caught a glimpse of her at the door. I thought she had a 
pretty, earnest look, with her " pippin " face ; an epithet by 
which she playfully designated herself. 

I had a little study overlooking the fields to Westbourne — 
a sequestered spot at that time embowered in trees. The 
study was draperied with white and green, having furniture 
to match; and as the noble poet had seen me during my 
imprisonment in a bower of roses, he might here be said, 
with no great stretch of imagination, to have found me in a 
box of lilies. I mention this, because he took pleasure in 
the look of the little apartment. Also, because my wife's 
fair cousin, Virtue Kent, now, alas ! no more, who was as 
good as she was intelligent, and as resolute as gentle, extin- 
guished me there one morning when my dressing-gown had 
caught fire. She was all her life, indeed, taking painful tasks 
on herself, to save trouble to others. 

In a room at the end of the garden to this house was a 
magnificent rocking-horse, which a friend had given my little 
boy; and Lord Byron, with a childish glee becoming a poet, 
would ride upon it. Ah ! why did he ever ride his Pegasus 
to less advantage ? Poets should never give up their privi- 
lege of surmounting sorrow with joy. 

It was here also I had the honour of a visit from Mr. 

15 



226 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Wordsworth. He came to thank me for the zeal I had 
shown in advocating the cause of his genius. I had the 
pleasure of showing him his book on my shelves by the side 
of Milton ; a sight which must have been the more agreeable, 
inasmuch as the visit was unexpected. He favoured me, in 
return, with giving his opinion of some of the poets his con- 
temporaries, who would assuredly not have paid him a visit 
on the same grounds on which he was pleased to honour 
myself. Nor do I believe, that from that day to this, he 
thought it becoming in him to reciprocate the least part of 
any benefit which a word in good season may have done for 
him. Lord Byron, in resentment for my having called him 
the " prince of the bards of his time," would not allow him 
to be even the " one-eyed monarch of the blind." He said 
he was the " blind monarch of the one-eyed." I must still 
differ with his lordship on that point ; but I must own, that, 
after all which I have seen and read, posterity, in my opinion, 
will |differ not a little with one person respecting the amount 
of merit to be ascribed to Mr. "Wordsworth ; though who 
that one person is, I shall leave the reader to discover. 

Mr. Wordsworth, w r hom Mr. Hazlitt designated as one that 
would have had the wide circle of his humanities made still 
wdder, and a good deal more pleasant, by dividing a little 
more of his time between his lakes in Westmoreland and the 
hotels of the metropolis, had a dignified manner, with a deep 
and roughish but not unpleasing voice, and an exalted mode 
of speaking. He had a habit of keeping his left hand in the 
bosom of his waistcoat; and in this attitude, except when he 
turned round to take one of the subjects of his criticism from 
the shelves (for his contemporaries were there also), he sal 
dealing forth his eloquent but hardly catholic judgments. Ir 
his " father's house " there were not " many mansions." He 
was as sceptical on the merits of all kinds of poetry but one 
as Richardson was on those of the novels of Fielding. 

Under the study in wdiich my visitor and I were sitting 
was an archway, leading to a nursery-ground; a cart hap- 
pened to go through it while I was inquiring whether h( 
would take any refreshment; and he uttered, in so lofty i 
voice, the words, " Anything which is going forward" that ] 
felt inclined to ask him whether he would take a piece of th( 
cart. Lamb would certainly have done it. But this was i 
levity which would neither have been so proper on my part 
after so short an acquaintance, nor very intelligible, perhaps 



FREE AGAIN.— SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 227 

in any sense of the word, to the serious poet. There are good- 
humoured warrants for smiling, which lie deeper even than 
Mr. Wordsworth's thoughts for tears. 

I did not see this distinguished person again till thirty years 
afterwards; when, I should venture to say, his manner was 
greatly superior to what it was in the former instance ; indeed, 
quite natural and noble, with a cheerful air of animal as well 
as spiritual confidence; a gallant bearing, curiously remind- 
ing me of the Duke of Wellington, as I saw him walking 
some eighteen years ago by a lady's side, with no unbecoming 
oblivion of his time of life. I observed, also, that the poet 
no longer committed himself in scornful criticisms, or, indeed, 
in any criticisms whatever, at least as far as I knew. He had 
found out that he could, at least, afford to be silent. Indeed, 
he spoke very little of anything. The conversation turned 
upon Milton, and I fancied I had opened a subject that would 
have " brought him out," by remarking, that the most dia- 
bolical thing in all Paradise Lost was a feeling attributed to 
the angels. " Ay ! " said Mr. Wordsworth, and inquired 
what it was. I said it was the passage in which the angels, 
when they observed Satan journeying through the empyrean, 
let down a set of steps out of heaven, on purpose to add to his 
misery — to his despair of ever being able to re-ascend them; 
they being angels in a state of bliss, and he a fallen spirit 
doomed to eternal punishment. The passage is as follows:— 

" Each stair was meant mysteriously, nor stood 
There always, but, drawn up to heaven, sometimes 
Viewless; and underneath a bright sea flow'd 
Of jasper, or of liquid pearl, whereon 
Who after came from earth sailing arriv'd 
Wafted by angels, or flew o'er the lake 
Eapt in a chariot drawn by fiery steeds. 
The stairs were then let down, whether to dare 
The fiend by easy ascent, or aggravate 
His sad exclusion from the doors of bliss" 

Mr. Wordsworth pondered, and said nothing. I thought to 
myself, what pity for the poor devil would not good uncle 
Toby have expressed ! Into what indignation would not 
Burns have exploded ! What knowledge of themselves would 
not have been forced upon those same coxcombical and malig- 
nant angels by Fielding or Shakspeare ! 

Walter Scott said, that the eyes of Burns were the finest | 
he ever saw. I cannot say the same of Mr. Wordsworth's ; 
that is, not in the sense of the beautiful, or even of the pro- 

15—2 



228 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

found. But certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so 
inspired or supernatural. They were like fires half burning, 
half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and 
seated at the further end of two caverns. One might imagine 
Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes. The finest eyes, in 
every sense of the word, which I have ever seen in a man's 

| head (and I have seen many fine ones) are those of Thomas 

1 Carlyle. 

It was for a good while after leaving prison that I was 
unable to return the visits of the friends who saw me there. 
Two years' confinement, and illness in combination, had acted 
so injuriously upon a sensitive temperament, that for many 
months I could not leave home without a morbid wish to 
return, and a fear of being seized with some fit or other in 
the streets, perhaps with sudden death ; and this was one of 
the periods when my hypochondria came back. In company, 
however, or at the sight of a friend, animal spirits would 
struggle even with that ; and few people, whatever ill-health 
I showed in my face, had the slightest idea of what I suffered. 

i When they thought I was simply jaundiced, I was puzzling 
myself with the cosmogony. When they fancied me wholly 
occupied in some conversation on a poem or a pot of flowers, 
I would be haunted with the question respecting the origin 
of evil. What agonies, to be sure — what horrible struggles 
between wonder and patience — I suffered then ! and into 
what a heaven of reliance and of gladness have I been since 
brought by a little better knowledge of the tuning of the in- 
struments of this existence, whether bodily or mental, taking 
right healthy spirits as the key-note, and harmonizing every- 
thing else with those ! But I have treated this point already. 
Let me again, however, advise any one who may be suffering 
melancholy of the same sort, or of any sort, to take this recol- 
lection of mine to heart, and do his best to derive comfort 
from it. I thought I should die early, and in suffering ; and 
here I am still, forty-two years afterwards, writing these words. 

" For thilke ground, that beareth the weeds wick, 
Beareth also these wholesome herbs as oft; 
And next to the foul nettle, rough and thick, 
The rose ywaxeth sweet, and smooth, and soft; 
And next the valley is the hill aloft; 
And next the darke night is the glad morrow, 
And also joy is next the fine of sorrow." — Chaucer. 

In the spring of the year 1816 I went to reside again in 



FREE AGAIN. — SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 229 

Hampstead, for the benefit of the air, and of my old field 
walks ; and there I finished the Story of Rimini, which was 
forthwith published. I have spoken of a masque on the 
downfall of Napoleon, called the Descent of Liberty, which I 
wrote while in prison. Liberty descends in it from heaven, 
to free the earth from the burden of an evil magician. It 
was a compliment to the Allies, which they deserved well 
enough, inasmuch as it was a failure ; otherwise they did not 
deserve it all; for it was founded on a belief in promises 
which they never kept. There was a vein of something true 
in the Descent of Liberty, particularly in passages where the 
domestic affections were touched upon ; but the poetry was 
too much on the surface. Fancy (encouraged by the allego- 
rical nature of the masque) played her part too entirely in it 
at the expense of imagination. I had not yet got rid of 
the self-sufficiency caused by my editorial position, or by the 
credit, better deserved, which political courage had obtained 
for me. I had yet to learn in what the subtler spirit of poetry 
consisted. 

Nor had I discovered it when I wrote the Story of Rimini. 
It was written in what, perhaps, at my time of life, and after 
the degree of poetical reputation which had been conceded 
me, I may be allowed, after the fashion of painters, to call my 
" first manner ; " not the worst manner conceivable, though 
far from the best; as far from it (or at whatever greater dis- 
tance modesty may require it to be put) as Dryden's Flower 
and the Leaf from the story in Chaucer which Dryden 
imitated. I must take leave, however, to regard it as a true 
picture, painted after a certain mode ; and I can never forget 
the comfort I enjoyed in painting it, though I think I have 
since executed some things with a more inward perception of 
poetical requirement. 

This poem, the greater part of which was written in prison, 
had been commenced a year or two before, while I was visit- 
ing the sea-coast at Hastings, with my wife and our first 
child. I was very happy; and looking among my books for 
some melancholy theme of verse, by which I could steady my 
felicity, I unfortunately chose the subject of Dante's famous 
episode. I did not consider, indeed at the time was not criti- 
cally aware, that to enlarge upon a subject which had been 
treated with exquisite sufficiency, and to his immortal renown, 
by a great master, was not likely, by any merit of detail, to 
save a tyro in the art from the charge of presumption, espe- 



230 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

cially one who had not yet even studied poetical mastery 
itself, except in a subordinate shape. Dryden, at that time, 
in spite of my sense of Milton's superiority, and my early love 
of Spenser, was the most delightful name to me in English 
poetry. I had found in him more vigour, and music too, 
than in Pope, who had been my closest poetical acquaintance ; 
and I could not rest till I had played on his instrument. I 
brought, however, to my task a sympathy with the tender 
and the pathetic, which I did not find in my pattern; and 
there was also an impulsive difference now and then in the 
style, and a greater tendency to simplicity of words. My 
versification was far from being so vigorous as his. There 
were many weak lines in it. It succeeded best in catching 
the variety of his cadences ; at least so far as they broke up 
the monotony of Pope. But I had a greater love for the 
beauties of external nature ; I think also I partook of a more 
southern insight into the beauties of colour, of which I made 
abundant use in the procession which is described in the first 
canto; and if I invested my story with too many circum- 
stances of description, especially on points not essential to its 
progress, and thus took leave in toto of the brevity, as well as 
the force of Dante, still the enjoyment which led me into the 
superfluity was manifest, and so far became its warrant. I 
had the pleasure of supplying my friendly critic, Lord Byron, 
with a point for his Parisina (the incident of the heroine 
talking in her sleep) ; of seeing all the reigning poets, without 
exception, break up their own heroic couplets into freer mo- 
dulation (which they never afterwards abandoned) and being 
paid for the resentment of the Tory critics in one single 
sentence from the lips of Mr. Sogers, who told me, when I 
met him for the first time at Lord Byron's house, that he had 
" just left a beautiful woman sitting over my poem in tears." 

I was then between twenty and thirty. Upwards of thirty 
years afterwards I was told by a friend, that he had just 
heard one of the most distinguished of living authoresses say 
she had shed " tears of vexation" on finding that I had recast 
the conclusion of the poem, and taken away so much of the 
first matter. Let it be allowed me to boast of tears of this 
kind, and to say what balm they have given me for many a 
wound. The portion of the poem taken away I have since 
restored, under a separate title, in the edition of my Poetical 
Works , which has appeared in America. By the other 
alteration I have finally thought it best to abide; and I have 



FKEE AGAIN.— SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 231 

thus reconciled as well as I could the friends of the first form 
of the poem and those of the new. 

I need hardly advert, at the present time of day, to the 
objections which were made to this production when it first 
appeared, by the wrath of the Tory critics. In fact, it would 
have met with no such hostility, or indeed any hostility at all, 
if politics had not judged it. Critics might have differed 
about it, of course, and reasonably have found fault ; but had 
it emanated from the circles, or been written by any person 
not obnoxious to political objection, I believe there is nobody 
at this time of day, who will not allow, that the criticism in 
all quarters would have been very good-natured, and willing 
to hail whatever merit it possessed. I may, therefore, be 
warranted in having spoken of it without any greater allusion 
to quarrels which have long been over, and to which I have 
confessed that I gave the first cause of provocation. 

The Story of Rimini had not long appeared when I received 
a copy of it, which looked like witchcraft. It was the iden- 
tical poem, in type and appearance, bound in calf, and sent 
me without any explanation ; but it was a little smaller. I 
turned it over a dozen times, wondering what it could be, and 
how it could have originated. The simple solution of the 
puzzle I did not consider, till I had summoned other persons 
to partake my astonishment. At length we consulted the 
title-page, and there saw the names of " Wells and Lilly, 
Boston; and M. Carey, Philadelphia." — I thought how the 
sight would have pleased my father and mother. 

I now returned the visits which Lord Byron had made me 
in prison. His wife's separation from him had just taken 
place, and he had become ill himself; his face was jaundiced 
with bile ; he felt the attacks of the public severely ; and, to 
crown all, he had an execution in his house. I was struck 
with the real trouble he manifested, compared with what the 
public thought of it. The adherence of his old friends was 
also touching. I saw Mr. Hobhouse, now Lord Broughton, 
and Mr. Scrope Davies (college friends of his) almost every 
time I called. Mr. Sogers was regular in his daily visits ; 
and Lord Holland, he told me, was very kind. 

Lord Byron, at this juncture, took the blame of the quarrel 
upon himself. He even enlisted the self-love of his new 
visitor so far on the lady's side, as to tell him " that she liked 
my poem, and had compared his temper to that of Giovanni, 
the heroine's consort." He also showed me a letter which she 



232 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. 

had written him after her departure from the house, and when 
she was on her way to the relations who persuaded her not to 
return. It was signed with the epithet before mentioned; 
and was written in a spirit of good-humour, and even of fond- 
ness, which, though containing nothing but what a wife ought 
to write, and is the better for writing, was, I thought, almost 
too good to show. But a certain over- communicativeness was 
one of those qualities of his lordship, which, though it some- 
times became the child-like simplicity of a poet, startled you 
at others in proportion as it led to disclosures of questionable 
propriety. 

I thought I understood the circumstances of this separation 
at the time, and still better some time afterwards ; but I have 
since been convinced, and the conviction grows stronger every 
day, that no domestic dispute, even if it were desirable or 
proper to investigate it, can ever be thoroughly understood 
unless you hear both parties, and know their entire relative 
situations, together with the interests and passions of those 
about them. You must also be sure of their statements, and 
see whether the statements on all sides themselves are pre- 
judiced or the reverse. Indeed you cannot know individuals 
themselves truly, unless you have lived with them; at all 
events, unless you have studied them long enough to know 
whether appearances are realities ; and although you may, 
and to a certain degree must, draw your own conclusions 
respecting people from statements which they give to the 
world, whether for or against themselves, yet it is safer, as 
well as pleasanter, to leave that question as much as possible 
in the place where it ought ever to abide, unless brought for- 
ward on the highest and noblest grounds ; namely, in the 
silence of the heart that has most suffered under its causes. 

I shall, therefore, say nothing more of a business which 
nobody ought to have heard of. Lord Byron soon afterwards 
left England, and I did not see him again, or hear from him, 
scarcely of him, till he proposed my joining him in Italy. I 
take my leave of him, therefore, till that period, and proceed 
to speak of the friends with whom I became intimate in the 
meanwhile — Shelley and Keats. 

I first saw Shelley during the early period of the Examiner, 
before its indictment on account of the Eegent ; but it was 
only for a few short visits, which did not produce intimacy. 
[It was indeed Mr. Rowland Hunter who first brought Leigh 
Hunt and his most valued friend personally together. Shelley 



FREE AGAIN.— SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 233 

had brought a manuscript poem which proved by no means 
suited to the publishing house in St. Paul's Churchyard. But 
Mr. Hunter sent the young reformer to seek the counsel of 
Leigh Hunt.] He was then a youth, not come to his full 
growth ; very gentlemanly, earnestly gazing at every object 
that interested him, and quoting the Greek dramatists. Not 
long afterwards he married his first wife ; and he subsequently 
wrote to me while I was in prison, as I have before mentioned. 
I renewed the correspondence a year or two afterwards, dur- 
ing which period one of the earliest as well as most beautiful 
of his lyric poems, the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, had ap- 
peared in the Examiner. Meantime, he and his wife had 
parted ; and now he re-appeared before me at Hampstead, in 
consequence of the calamity which I am about to mention. 

But this circumstance it will be proper to introduce with 
some remarks, and a little previous biography. 

It is hardly necessary to inform the reader at this present 
day, that Percy Bysshe Shelley was the eldest son of Sir 
Timothy Shelley, Bart., of Castle-Goring, in Sussex. He was 
born at Field Place, in that county, the 4th of August, 1792. 

It is difficult, under any circumstances, to speak with pro- 
per delicacy of the living connections of the dead ; but it is 
no violation of decorum to observe, that the family con- 
nections of Mr. Shelley belonged to a small party in the House 
of Commons, itself belonging to another party. They were 
Whig Aristocrats, voting in the interest of the Duke of Nor- 
folk. To a man of genius, endowed with a metaphysical 
acuteness to discern truth and falsehood, and a strong sensi- 
bility to give way to his sense of it, such an origin, however 
respectable in the ordinary point of view, was not the very 
luckiest that could have happened for the purpose of keeping 
him within ordinary bounds. With what feelings is Truth to 
open its eyes upon this world among the most respectable of 
our mere party gentry ? Among licensed contradictions of 
all sorts? among the Christian doctrines and the worldly 
practices ? Among fox-hunters and their chaplains ? among 
beneficed loungers, rakish old gentlemen, and more startling 
young ones, who are old in the folly of Jcnowingness ? people 
not indeed bad in themselves ; not so bad as their wholesale 
and unthinking decriers, much less their hypocritical decriers; 
many excellent by nature, but spoilt by those professed de- 
mands of what is right and noble, and those inculcations, at 
the same time, of what is false and wrong, which have been 



234 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

so admirably exposed by a late philosopher (Bentham), and 
which he has fortunately helped some of our best living 
statesmen to leave out of the catalogue of their ambitions. 

Shelley began to think at a very early age, and to think, 
too, of these anomalies. He saw that at every step in life 
some compromise was expected between a truth which he was 
told not to violate, and a colouring and double-meaning of it 
which forced him upon the violation. 

With this jumble, then, of truth and falsehood in his head, 
and a genius born to detect it, Shelley was sent to Eton, and 
afterwards to the University of Oxford. At Eton a Reviewer 
recollected him setting trees on fire with a burning-glass ; a 
proceeding which the critic set down to his natural taste for 
destruction. Perhaps the same Reviewer (if we are not mis- 
taken as to the person) would now, by the help of his own 
riper faculties, attribute it to the natural curiosity of genius. 
At the same school, the young reformer rose up in opposition 
to the system of fagging. Against this custom he formed a 
conspiracy; and for a time he made it pause, at least as far as 
his own person was concerned. His feelings at this period of 
his life are touchingly and powerfully described in the dedi- 
cation of the Eevolt of Islam : — 

" Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first 
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. 

I do remember well the hour which burst 
My spirit's sleep : a fresh May day it was, 
When I walk'd forth upon the glittering grass, 

And wept, I know not why, until there rose, 
From the near schoolroom, voices that, alas! 

Were but one echo from a world of woes— 

The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. 

" And then I clasp'd my hands, and look'd around, — 

But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, 
Which pour'd their warm drops on the sunny ground: 

So without shame I spake: ' I will be wise, 

And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies 
Such power; for I grow weary to behold 

The selfish and the strong still tyrannize 
Without reproach or check.' I then controll'd 
My tears; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold. 

" And from that hour did I, with earnest thought, 
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore; 

Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught 
I cared to learn; but from that secret store 
Wrought linked armour for my soul, before 

It might walk forth to war among mankind." 



FREE AGAIN. — SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 235 

Shelley, I believe, was taken from Eton before the regular 
period for leaving school. His unconventional spirit — pene- 
trating, sincere, and demanding the reason and justice of 
things — was found to be inconvenient. At Oxford it was 
worse. Logic was there put into his hands ; and he used it 
in the most uncompromising manner. The more important 
the proposition, the more he thought himself bound to inves- 
tigate it : the greater the demand upon his assent, the less, 
upon their own principle of reasoning, he thought himself 
bound to grant it : for the university, by its ordinances, in- 
vited scholars to ask questions which they found themselves 
unable to answer. Shelley did so ; and the answer was ex- 
pulsion. It is true, the question he asked was a very hard 
one. It was upon the existence of God. But could neither 
Faith, Hope, nor Charity find a better answer than that ? and 
in the teeth, too, of their own challenge to inquiry ? Could 
not some gentle and loving nature have been found to speak 
to him in private, and beg him at least to consider and pause 
over the question, for reasons which might have had their 
corresponding effect ? The Church of England has been a 
blessing to mankind, inasmuch as it has discountenanced the 
worst superstitions, and given sense and improvement leave to 
grow ; but if it cannot learn still further to sacrifice letter to 
spirit, and see the danger of closing its lips on the greatest 
occasions and then proceeding to open them on the smallest, 
and dispute with its very self on points the most " frivolous 
and vexatious," it will do itself an injury it little dreams of 
with the new and constantly growing intelligence of the 
masses; who are looking forward to the noblest version of 
Christianity, while their teachers are thus fighting about the 
meanest. 

Conceive a young man of Mr. Shelley's character, with no 
better experience of the kindness and sincerity of those whom 
he had perplexed, thus thrown forth into society, to form his 
own judgments, and pursue his own career. It was EmiUus 
out in the World, but formed by his own tutorship. There is 
a novel, under that title, written by the German La Fontaine, 
which has often reminded me of him. The hero of another, 
by the same author, called the Reprobate, still more resembles 
him. His way of proceeding was entirely after the fashion of 
those guileless, but vehement hearts, which not being well 
replied to by their teachers, and finding them hostile to in- 
quiry, add to a natural love of truth all the passionate ardour 



236 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. 

of a generous and devoted protection of it. Shelley had met 
with Godwin's Political Justice, and he seemed to breathe, for 
the first time, in an open and bright atmosphere. He resolved 
to square all his actions by what he conceived to be the 
strictest justice, without any consideration for the opinions of 
those whose little exercise of that virtue towards himself ill 
fitted them, he thought, for better teachers, and as ill warranted 
him in deferring to the opinions of the world whom they 
guided. That he did some extraordinary things in conse- 
quence is admitted : that he did many noble ones, and all with 
sincerity, is well known to his friends, and will be admitted 
by all sincere persons. Let those who are so fond of exposing 
their own natures, by attributing every departure from ordi- 
nary conduct to bad motives, ask themselves what conduct 
could be more extraordinary in their eyes, and at the same 
time less attributable to a bad motive, than the rejection of an 
estate for the love of a principle? Yet Shelley rejected one. 
He had only to become a yea and nay man in the House of 
Commons, to be one of the richest men in Sussex. He de- 
clined it, and lived upon a comparative pittance. Even the 
fortune that he would ultimately have inherited, as secured to 
his person, was petty in the comparison. 

So he went up to town. Had he now behaved himself par- 
donably in the eyes of the conventional in those days (for it 
is wonderful in how short a time honest discussion may be 
advanced by a court at once correct and unbigoted, and by a 
succession of calmly progressing ministries ; and all classes 
are now beginning to permit the wisdom of every species of 
abuse to be doubted), Shelley would have gone to London 
with the resolution of sowing his wild oats, and becoming a 
decent member of society; that is to say, he would have 
seduced a few maid-servants, or at least haunted the lobbies 
of the theatre, and then bestowed the remnant of his consti- 
tution upon some young lady of his own rank in life, and 
settled into a proper church-and-king man of the old leaven, 
perhaps a member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. 
This used to be the proper routine, and gave one a right to be 
didactic. Alas ! Shelley did not do so ; and bitterly had he 
to repent, not that he did not do it, but that he married while 
yet a stripling, and that the wife whom he took was not of a 
nature to appreciate his understanding, or, perhaps, to come 
from contact with it uninjured in what she had of her own. 
They separated by mutual consent, after the birth of two 



FUEE AGAIN. — SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 237 

children. To this measure his enemies would hardly have 
demurred ; especially as the marriage was disapproved by the 
husband's family, and the lady was of inferior rank. It might 
have been regarded even as something like making amends. 
But to one thing they would strongly have objected. He pro- 
ceeded, in the spirit of Milton's doctrines, to pay his court to 
another lady. I wish I could pursue the story in the same 
tone ; but now came the greatest pang of his life. He was 
residing at Bath, when news came to him that his wife had 
destroyed herself. It was a heavy blow to him, and he never 
forgot it. For a time it tore his being to pieces ; nor is there 
a doubt that, however deeply he was accustomed to reason on 
the nature and causes of evil, and on the steps necessary to b 
taken for opposing it, he was not without remorse for having 
no better exercised his judgment with regard to the degree of 
intellect he had allied himself with, and for having given rise 
to a premature independence of conduct in one unequal to the 
task. The lady was greatly to be pitied; so was the survivor. 
Let the collegiate refusers of argument, and the conventional 
sowers of their wild oats, with myriads of unhappy women 
behind them, rise up in judgment against him ! Honester men 
will not be hindered from doing justice to sincerity wherever 
they find it ; nor be induced to blast the memory of a man of 
genius and benevolence, for one painful passage in his life, 
which he might have avoided had he been no better than his 
calumniators. 

On the death of his unfortunate lady, Shelley married the 
daughter of Mr. Godwin, and resided at Great Marlow, in 
Buckinghamshire, where my family and myself paid him a 
visit, and where he was a blessing to the poor. His charity, 
though liberal, was not weak. He inquired personally into 
the circumstances of his petitioners, visited the sick in their 
beds (for he had gone the round of the hospitals on purpose 
to be able to practise on occasion), and kept a regular list of 
industrious poor, whom he assisted with small sums to make 
up their accounts. 

Here he wrote the Revolt of Islam and A Proposal for 
putting Reform to the Vote through the Country, He offered 
to give a tenth part of his income for a year towards the 
advancement of the project. He used to sit in a study adorned 
with casts, as large as life, of the Vatican Apollo and the celes- 
tial Venus. Betweenwhiles he would walk in the garden, or 
take strolls about the country, or a sail in a boat, a diversion 



238 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

of which he was passionately fond. Flowers, or the sight of 
a happy face, or the hearing of a congenial remark, would 
make his eyes sparkle with delight. At other times he would 
suddenly droop into an aspect of dejection, particularly when 
a wretched face passed him, or when he saw the miserable - 
looking children of a lace-making village near him, or when 
he thought of his own children, of whom he had been deprived 
by the Court of Chancery. He once said to me during a walk 
in the Strand, "Look at all these worn and miserable faces 
that pass us, and tell me what is to be thought of the world 
they appear in?" I said, "All, but these faces are not all 
worn with grief. You must take the wear and tear of plea- 
sure into the account ; of secret joys as well as sorrows ; of 
merry-makings and sittings-up at night. " He owned that 
there was truth in the remark. This was the sort of consola- 
tion which I Was in the habit of giving him, and for which he 
was thankful, because I was sincere. 

As to his children, the reader, perhaps, is not aware that in 
this country of England, so justly called free on many accounts, 
and so proud of its " Englishman's castle" — of the house which 
nothing can violate — a mans offspring can be taken from him 
to-morrow, who holds a different opinion from the Lord Chan- 
cellor in faith and morals. Hume's, if he had any, might 
have been taken. Gibbon's might have been taken. The vir- 
tuous Condorcet, if he had been an Englishman and a father, 
would have stood no chance. Plato, for his Republic, would 
have stood as little ; and Mademoiselle de Gournay might have 
been torn from the arms of her adopting father, Montaigne, 
convicted beyond redemption of seeing farther than the walls 
of the Court of Chancery. That such things are not done 
often, I believe : that they may be done oftener than people 
suspect, I believe also ; for they are transacted with closed 
doors, and the details are forbidden to transpire. 

Queen Mab, Shelley's earliest poetical production, written 
before he was out of his teens, and regretted by him as a 
crude production, was published without his consent. Yet he 
was convicted from it of holding the opinion which his teachers 
at the University had not thought fit to reason him out of. 
He was also charged with not being of the received opinions 
with regard to the intercourse of the sexes ; and his children, 
a girl and a boy, were taken from him. They were trans- 
ferred to the care of a clergyman of the Church of England. 
The circumstance deeply affected Shelley : so much so, that 



FREE AGAIN. — SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 239 

he never afterwards dared to trust himself with mentioning 
their names in my hearing, though I had stood at his side 
throughout the business ; probably for that reason.* Shelley's 
manner of life suffered greatly in its repute from this circum- 
stance. He was said to be keeping a seraglio at Marlow ; and 
his friends partook of the scandal. This keeper of a seraglio, 
who, in fact, was extremely difficult to be pleased in such 
matters, and who had no idea of love unconnected with senti- 
ment, passed his days like a hermit. He rose early in the 
morning, walked and read before breakfast, took that meal 
sparingly, wrote and studied the greater part of the morning, 
walked and read again, dined on vegetables (for he took neither 
meat nor wine), conversed with his friends (to whom his house 
was ever open), again walked out, and usually finished with 
reading to his wife till ten o'clock, when he went to bed. This 
was his daily existence. His book was generally Plato, or 
Homer, or one of the Greek tragedians, or the Bible, in which 
last he took a great, though peculiar, and often admiring in- 
terest. One of his favourite parts was the book of Job. The 
writings attributed to Solomon he thought too Epicurean, in 
the modern sense of the word ; and in his notions of St. Paul 
he agreed with the writer of the work entitled, Not Paul but 
Jesus. For his Christianity, in the proper sense of the word, 
he went to the Epistle of St. James, and to the Sermon on the 
Mount by Christ himself, for whose beneficent intentions he 
entertained the greatest reverence. There was nothing which 
embittered his enemies against him more than the know- 
ledge of this fact. His want of faith, indeed, in the letter, 
and his exceeding faith in the spirit, of Christianity, formed 
a comment, the one on the other, very formidable to those 
who chose to forget what Scripture itself observes on that 
point. | 

As an instance of Shelley's extraordinary generosity, a 

* The boy is since dead; and Shelley's son by his second wife, the 
daughter of Godwin, has succeeded to the baronetcy. It seldom falls 
to the lot of a son to have illustrious descent so neaped upon him ; 
his mother a women of talents; his father a man of genius; his 
grandfather, Godwin, a writer secure of immortality; his grand- 
mother, Godwin's wife, the celebrated Mary Wollstonecraf't: and on 
the side of his father's ancestors he partakes of the blood of the 
intellectual as well as patrician family of the Sackvilles. But, what 
is best of all, his own intelligent and liberal nature makes him worthy 
of all this lustre. 

f "For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." 



240 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

friend of his, a man of letters, enjoyed from him at that 
period a pension of a hundred a year, though he had but a 
thousand of his own ; and he continued to enjoy it till fortune 
rendered it superfluous. But the princeliness of his disposi- 
tion was seen most in his behaviour to another friend, the 
writer of this memoir, who is proud to relate, that with 
money raised by an effort, Shelley once made him a present 
of fourteen hundred pounds, to extricate him from debt. I 
was not extricated, for I had not yet learned to be careful : 
but the shame of not being so, after such generosity, and the 
pain which my friend afterwards underwent when I was in 
trouble and he was helpless, were the first causes of my 
thinking of money matters to any purpose. His last sixpence 
was ever at my service, had I chosen to share it. In a 
poetical epistle written some years afterwards, and published 
in the volume of Posthumous Poems, Shelley, in alluding to 
his friend's circumstances, which for the second time were 
then straitened, only made an affectionate lamentation that he 
himself was poor ; never once hinting that he had already 
drained his purse for his friend. 

To return to Hampstead. — Shelley often came there to see 
me, sometimes to stop for several days. He delighted in the 
natural broken ground, and in the fresh air of the place, 
especially when the wind set in from the north-west, which 
used to give him an intoxication of animal spirits. Here also 
he swam his paper boats on the ponds, and delighted to play 
with my children, particularly with my eldest boy, the serious- 
ness of whose imagination, and his susceptibility of a " grim" 
impression (a favourite epithet of Shelley's), highly interested 
him. He would play at " frightful creatures " with him, from 
which the other would snatch " a fearful joy," only begging 
him occasionally " not to do the horn," which was a way that 
Shelley had of screwing up his hair in front, to imitate a 
weapon of that sort. This was the boy (now the man of 
forty-eight, and himself a fine writer) ,to whom Lamb took 
such a liking on similar accounts, and addressed some charm- 
ing verses as his " favourite child." I have already mentioned 
him during my imprisonment. 

As an instance of Shelley's playfulness when he was in 
good spirits, he was once going to town with me in the 
Hampstead stage, when our only companion was an old lady, 
who sat silent and still after the English fashion. Shelley 
was fond of quoting a passage from Hicharcl the Second, in 



FREE AGAIN. — SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 241 

the commencement of which the king, in the indulgence of 
his misery, exclaims — 

"For Heaven's sake! let us sit upon the ground, 
And tell sad stories of the death of kings." 

Shelley, who had been moved into the ebullition by some- 
thing objectionable which he thought he saw in the face of 
our companion, startled her into a look of the most ludicrous 
astonishment, by suddenly calling this passage to mind, and, 
in his enthusiastic tone of voice, addressing me by name with 
the first two lines. " Hunt !" he exclaimed, — 

" For Heaven's sake ! let us sit upon the ground, 
And tell sad stories of the death of kings." 

The old lady looked on the coach-floor, as if expecting to see 
us take our seats accordingly. 

But here follows a graver and more characteristic anecdote. 
Shelley was not only anxious for the good of mankind in 
general. We have seen what he proposed on the subject of 
Eeform in Parliament, and he was always very desirous of the 
national welfare. It was a moot point when he entered your 
room, whether he would begin with some half-pleasant, half- 
pensive joke, or quote something Greek, or ask some question 
about public affairs. He once came upon me at Hampstead, 
when I had not seen him for some time ; and after grasping 
my hands with both his, in his usual fervent manner, he sat 
down, and looked at me very earnestly, with a deep, though 
not melancholy, interest in his face. We were sitting with 
our knees to the fire, to which we had been getting nearer and 
nearer, in the comfort of finding ourselves together. The 
pleasure of seeing him was my only feeling at the moment ; 
and the air of domesticity about us was so complete, that I 
thought he was going to speak of some family matter, either 
his or my own, when he asked me, at the close of an intensity 
of pause, what was " the amount of the national debt." 

I used to rally him on the apparent inconsequentiality of his 
manner upon those occasions, and he was always ready to carry 
on the jest, because he said that my laughter did not hinder 
my being in earnest. 

But here follows a crowning anecdote, with which I shall 
close my recollections of him at this period. We shall meet 
him again in Italy, and there, alas! I shall have to relate 
events graver still. 

I was returning home one night to Hampstead after the 

16 



242 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

opera. As I approached the door, I heard strange and alarm- 
ing shrieks, mixed with the voice of a man. The next day it 
was reported by the gossips that Mr. Shelley, no Christian (for 
it was he who was there), had brought some " very strange 
female " into the house, no better, of course, than she ought 
to be. The real Christian had puzzled them. Shelley, in 
coming to our house that night, had found a woman lying 
near the top of the hill, in fits. It was a fierce winter night, 
with snow upon the ground ; and winter loses nothing of its 
fierceness at Hampstead. My friend, always the promptest as 
well as most pitying on these occasions, knocked at the first 
houses he could reach, in order to have the woman taken in. 
The invariable answer was, that they could not do it. He 
asked for an outhouse to put her in, while he went for a doctor. 
Impossible ! In vain he assured them she was no impostor. 
They would not dispute the point with him ; but doors were 
closed, and windows were shut down. Had he lit upon 
worthy Mr. Park, the philologist, that gentleman would assur- 
edly have come, in spite of his Calvinism. But he lived too 
far off. Had he lit upon my friend Armitage Brown, who 
lived on another side of the Heath ; or on his friend and 
neighbour Dilke ; they would either of them have jumped up 
from amidst their books or their bed-clothes, and have gone 
out with him. But the paucity of Christians is astonishing, 
considering the number of them. Time flies ; the poor 
woman is in convulsions ; her son, a young man, lamenting 
over her. At last my friend sees a carriage driving up to a 
house at a little distance. The knock is given ; the warm 
door opens ; servants and lights pour forth. Now, thought 
he, is the time. He puts on his best address, which anybody 
might recognize for that of the highest gentleman as well as 
of an interesting individual, and plants himself in the way of 
an elderly person, who is stepping out of the carriage with his 
family. He tells his story. They only press on the faster. 
u Will you go and see her ? " " No, sir ; there's no necessity 
for that sort of thing, depend on it. Impostors swarm every- 
where : the thing cannot be done ; sir, your conduct is extra- 
ordinary." " Sir," cried Shelley, assuming a very different 
manner, and forcing the flourishing householder to stop out of 
astonishment, " I am sorry to say that your conduct is not ex- 
traordinary ; and if my own seems to amaze you, I will tell 
you something which may amaze you a little more, and I hope 
will frighten you. It is such men as you who madden the 



FREE AGAIN. — SHELLEY IN ENGLAND. 243 

spirits and the patience of the poor and wretched ; and if ever 
a convulsion comes in this country (which is very probable), 
recollect what I tell you : — you will have your house, that 
you refuse to put the miserable woman into, burnt over your 
head." " God bless me, sir! Dear me, sir!" exclaimed the 
poor, frightened man, and fluttered into his mansion. The 
woman was then brought to our house, which was at some 
distance, and down a bleak path (it was in the Yale of Health) ; 
and Shelley and her son were obliged to hold her till the 
doctor could arrive. It appeared that she had been attending 
this son in London, on a criminal charge made against him, 
the agitation of which had thrown her into the fits on her 
return. The doctor said that she would have perished, had 
she lain there a short time longer. The next day my friend 
sent mother and son comfortably home to Hendon, where they 
were known, and whence they returned him thanks full o 
gratitude. 

CHAPTEB XVI. 

KEATS, LAMB, AND COLERIDGE. 

And now to speak of Keats, who was introduced to me by his 
schoolmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, a man of a most 
genial nature and corresponding poetical taste, admirably well 
qualified to nourish the genius of his pupil. 

I had not known the young poet long, when Shelley and 
he became acquainted under my roof. Keats did not take 
to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him. Shelleys only 
thoughts of his new acquaintance were such as regarded his 
bad health, with which he sympathized, and his poetry, of 
which he has left such a monument of his admiration in 
Adonais. Keats, being a little too sensitive on the score of 
his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a sort of 
natural enemy. Their styles in writing also were very differ- 
ent ; and Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies 
with ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental 
cosmopolitics of Hyperion, was so far inferior in universality 
to his great acquaintance, that he could not accompany him in 
his daedal rounds with nature, and his Archimedean endea- 
vours to move the globe with his own hands. I am bound to 
state thus much ; because, hopeless of recovering his health, 
under circumstances that made the feeling extremely bitter, 

1G— 2 



244 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUM. 

an irritable morbidity appears even to have driven his suspi- 
cions to excess ; and this not only with regard to the acquaint- 
ance whom he might reasonably suppose to have had some 
advantages over him, but to myself, who had none ; for I 
learned the other day, with extreme pain, such as I am sure 
so kind and reflecting a man as Mr. Monckton Milnes would 
not have inflicted on me could he have foreseen it, that Keats 
at one period of his intercourse with us suspected both 
Shelley and myself of a wish to see him undervalued ! Such 
are the tricks which constant infelicity can play with the most 
noble natures. For Shelley, let Adonais answer. For myself, 
let every word answer which I uttered about him, living and 
dead, and such as I now proceed to repeat. I might as well 
have been told that I wished to see the flowers or the stars 
undervalued, or my own heart that loved him. 

But it was sickness, and passed away. It appears, by Mr. 
Milnes' book, that all his friends dissatisfied him in the course 
of those trials of his temper ; and my friend, Mr. Milnes, will 
allow me to say, that those Letters and Remains of the young 
poet were not among his happiest effusions, nor wanting to 
supply a certain force of character to his memory. That 
memory possessed force enough already for those who were 
qualified to discern it ; and those who were not, hardly de- 
served to have their own notions of energy flattered at the 
poet's expense. Keats was already known to have personally 
chastised a blackguard, and to have been the author of 
Hyperion : 

" That large utterance of the early gods." 

What more could have been necessary to balance the trem- 
bling excess of sensibility in his earlier poems ? The world 
has few enough incarnations of poets themselves in Arcadian 
shapes, to render necessary any deterioration of such as it has 
the luck to possess. 

But perhaps my own personal feelings induce me to carry 
this matter too far. In the publication alluded to is a con- 
temptuous reference (not by Mr. Milnes) to a paper in the 
Examiner on the season of Christmas. I turned to it with 
new feelings of anxiety ; and there I found no warrant for 
such reference, unless a certain tone of self-complacency, so 
often regretted in this autobiography, can have justified it. 

Keats appears to have been of opinion that I ought to have 
taken more notice of what the critics said against him. And 
perhaps I ought. My notices of them may not have been 



KEATS, LAMB, AND COLERIDGE. 245 

sufficient. I may have too much contented myself with 
panegyrizing his genius, and thinking the objections to it of 
no ultimate importance. Had he given me a hint to another 
effect, I should have acted upon it, But in truth, as I have 
before intimated, I did not see a twentieth part of what was 
said against us ; nor had I the slightest notion, at that period, 
that he took criticism so much to heart. I was in the habit, 
though a public man, of living in a world of abstractions of 
my own; and I regarded him as of a nature still more ab- 
stracted, and sure of renown. Though I was a politician (so 
to speak), I had scarcely a political work in my library. 
Spensers and Arabian Tales filled up the shelves ; and Spenser 
himself was not remoter, in my eyes, from all the common- 
places of life, than my new friend. Our whole talk was made 
up of idealisms. In the streets we were in the thick of the 
old woods. I little suspected, as I did afterwards, that the 
hunters had struck him ; and never at any time did I suspect 
that he could have imagined it desired by his friends. Let 
me quit the subject of so afflicting a delusion. 

In everything but this reserve, which was to a certain ex- 
tent encouraged by my own incuriousness (for I have no 
reserve myself with those whom I love) — in every other 
respect but this, Keats and I might have been taken for friends 
of the old stamp, between whom there was no such thing even 
as obligation, except the pleasure of it. I could not love him 
as deeply as I did Shelley. That was impossible. But my 
affection was only second to the one which I entertained for 
that heart of hearts. Keats, like Shelley himself, enjoyed the 
usual privilege of greatness with all whom he knew, render- 
ing it delightful to be obliged by him, and an equal, but not 
greater, delight to oblige. It was a pleasure to his friends to 
have him in their houses, and he did not grudge it. When 
Endymion was published, he was living at Hampstead with 
his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, who attended him most 
affectionately through a severe illness, and with whom, to 
their great mutual enjoyment, he had taken a journey into 
Scotland. The lakes and mountains of the north delighted 
him exceedingly. He beheld them with an epic eye. After- 
wards, he went into the south, and luxuriated in the Isle of 
Wight. On Brown's leaving home a second time, to visit the 
same quarter, Keats, who was too ill to accompany him, came 
to reside with me, when his last and best volume of poems 
appeared, containing Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Ag?ies, 



24:0 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

and the noble fragment of Hyperion. I remember Lamb's 
delight and admiration on reading this book ; how pleased he 
was with the designation of Mercury as " the star of Lethe" 
(rising, as it were, and glittering as he came upon that pale 
region); and the fine daring anticipation in that passage of 
the second poem — 

" So the two brothers and their murdered man 
Kode past fair Elorence." 

So also the description, at once delicate and gorgeous, of Agnes 
praying beneath the painted window. The public are now well 
acquainted with those and other passages, for which Persian 
kings would have filled a poet's mouth with gold. I remember 
Keats reading to me with great relish and particularity, con- 
scious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper, 
and ending with the words, 

" Lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon." 
Mr. Wordsworth would have said that the vowels were not 
varied enough ; but Keats knew where his vowels were not to 
be varied. On the occasion above alluded to, Wordsworth 
found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the 
participles in Shakspeare's line about bees : — 

" The singing masons building roofs of gold." 
This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have 
written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition 
was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and 
that Shakspeare's negligence (if negligence it was) had in- 
stinctively felt the thing in the best manner. The assertion 
about Milton is startling, considering the tendency of that 
great poet to subject his nature to art ; yet I have dipped, 
while writing this, into Paradise Lost, and at the second 
chance have lit on the following : — 

" The gray 
Dawn, and the Pleiades before him danced, 
Shedding sweet influence. Less bright the moon, 
But opposite, in levelled west, was set 
His mirrour, with full force borrowing her light." 

The repetition of the e in the fourth line is an extreme case in 
point, being monotonous in order to express oneness and even- 
ness. 

Keats had felt that his disease was mortal, two or three 
years before he died. He had a constitutional tendency to 
consumption; a close attendance on the deathbed of a beloved 



KEATS, LAMB, AND COLERIDGE. 247 

brother, when he ought to have been nursing himself in bed, 
gave it a blow which he felt for months. Despairing love 
(that is to say, despairing of living to enjoy it, for the love 
was returned) added its hourly torment; and, meanwhile, the 
hostile critics came up, and roused an indignation in him, both 
against them and himself, which on so many accounts he could 
ill afford to endure. 

"When I was in Italy, Lord Byron showed me in manuscript 
the well-known passage in Don Juan, in which Keats's death 
is attributed to the Quarterly Review ; the couplet about the 
" fiery particle," that was " snuffed out by an article." I told 
him the real state of the case, proving to him that the suppo- 
sition was a mistake, and therefore, if printed, would be a mis- 
representation. But a stroke of wit was not to be given up. 

At length Keats was persuaded by his friends to try the 
milder climate of Italy. He thought it better for others as 
well as himself, that he should go. He was accompanied by 
Mr. Severn, then a young artist of a promise equal to his 
subsequent repute, who possessed all that could recommend 
him for a companion — old acquaintanceship, great animal 
spirits, active tenderness, and a mind capable of appreciating 
that of the poet. They went first to Naples, and afterwards 
to Eome; where, on the 23rd of February, 1821, our author 
died in the arms of his friend, completely worn out, and long- 
ing for the release. He suffered so much in his lingering, that 
he used to watch the countenance of the physician for the 
favourable and fatal sentence, and express his regret when he 
found it delayed. Yet no impatience escaped him. Pie was 
manly and gentle to the last, and grateful for all services. A 
little before he died, he said that he " felt the daisies growing 
over him." But he made a still more touching remark respect- 
ing his epitaph. " If any," he said, " were put over him, he 
wished it to consist of nothing but these words : ' Here lies 
one whose name was writ in water: ' " — so little did he think 
of the more than promise he had given; — of the fine and 
lasting things he had added to the stock of poetry! The 
physicians expressed their astonishment that he had held out 
so long, the lungs turning out, on inspection, to have been 
almost obliterated. They said he must have lived upon the 
mere strength of the spirit within him. He was interred in 
the English burying-ground at Eome, near the monument of 
Caius Cestius, where his great mourner, Shelley, was shortly 
to join him. 



248 ' AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Keats, when he died, had just completed his four-and- 
twentieth year. He was Tinder the middle height; and his 
lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper, but 
neat and well turned. His shoulders were very broad for his 
size : he had a face in which energy and sensibility were 
remarkably mixed up ; an eager power, checked and made 
patient by ill-health. Every feature was at once strongly 
cut, and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression, 
it was in the mouth, which was »not without something of a 
character of pugnacity. His face was rather long than other- 
wise; the upper lip projected a little over the under; the 
chin was bold, the cheeks sunken ; the eyes mellow and glow- 
ing ; large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble 
action, or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, 
and his mouth trembled. In this, there was ill-health as well 
as imagination, for he did not like these betrayals of emotion ; 
and he had great personal as well as moral courage. He once 
chastised a butcher, who had been insolent, by a regular 
stand-up fight. His hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and 
hung in natural ringlets. The head was a puzzle for the 
[phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull; a singu- 
larity which he had in common with Byron and Shelley, 
whose hats I could not get on. Keats was sensible of the 
disproportion above noticed, between his upper and lower 
extremities ; and he would look at his hand, which was faded, 
and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a man 
of fifty. He was a seven months' child. His mother, who 
was a lively woman, passionately fond of amusement, is sup- 
posed to have hastened her death by too great an inattention 
to hours and seasons. Perhaps she hastened that of her son. 
His father died of a fall from his horse in the year 1804. 

I have endeavoured, in another publication,* to characterize 
the poetry of Keats, both in its merits and defects. It is not 
necessary to repeat them here. The public have made up 
their minds on the subject; and such of his first opponents 
as were men of genius themselves, but suffered their percep- 
tions to be obscured by political prejudice, (as who has not 
in such time ?) have long agreed with, or anticipated the 
verdict. Sir Walter Scott confessed to Mr. Severn at Eome, 
that the truth respecting Keats had prevailed ; and it would 
have been strange, indeed, when the heat of the battle was 
over, had not Christopher North stretched out his large and 
* Imagination and Fancy, p. 312. 



KEATS, LAMB, AND COLERIDGE. 249 

Warm hand to his memory. Times arrive, under the hal- 
lowing influences of thought and trouble, when genius is as 
sure to acknowledge genius, as it is to feel its own wants, and 
to be willing to share its glory. A man's eyes, the manlier i 
they are, perceive at last, that there is nothing nobler in them I 
than their tears. 

It was during my intimacy with Keats that I published a 
hasty set of miscellaneous poems, under the title of Foliage, 
and wrote the set of essays that have since become popular 
under that of the Indicator. About this time also, I trans- 
lated the Aminta of Tasso, a poem (be it said with the leave 
of so great a name) hardly worth the trouble, though the 
prologue is a charming presentment of love in masquerade, 
and the Ode on the Golden Age, a sigh out of the honestest 
part of the heart of humanity. But I translated it to enable 
me to meet some demands, occasioned by the falling off in 
the receipts of the Examiner, now declining under the twofold 
vicissitude of triumphant ascendancy in the Tories, and the 
desertion of reform by the Whigs. The Indicator assisted me 
still more, though it was but published in a corner, owing to 
my want of funds for advertising it, and my ignorance of the 
best mode of circulating such things — an ignorance so pro- 
found, that I was not even aware of its very self; for I had 
never attended, not only to the business part of the Examiner, 
but to the simplest money matter that stared at me on the 
face of it. I could never tell anybody who asked me, what 
was the price of its stamp ! 

Do I boast of this ignorance ? Alas ! I have no such 
respect for the pedantry of absurdity as that. I blush for it; 
and I only record it out of a sheer painful movement of 
conscience, as a warning to those young authors who might 
be led to look upon such folly as a fine thing; which at all 
events is what I never thought it myself. I did not think 
about it at all, except to avoid the thought; and I only wish 
that the strangest accidents of education, and the most incon- 
siderate habit of taking books for the only ends of life, had 
not conspired to make me so ridiculous. I am feeling the 
consequences at this moment, in pangs which I cannot explain, 
and which I may not live long enough, perhaps, to escape. 

Let me console myself a little by remembering how much 
Hazlitt and Lamb, and others, were pleased with the Indicator. 
I speak most of them, because they talked most to me about 
it. Hazlitt's favourite paper (for they liked it enough to have 



250 AUTOBIOGBAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

favourite papers) was the one on Sleep ; perhaps because there 
is a picture in it of a sleeping despot; though he repeated, 
with more enthusiasm than he was accustomed to do, the con- 
clusion about the parent and the bride. Lamb preferred the 
paper on Coaches and their Horses, that on the Deaths of Little 
Children, and (I think) the one entitled Thoughts and Guesses 
on Human Nature. Shelley took to the story of the Fair 
Revenge; and the paper that was most liked by Keats, if I 
remember, was the one on a hot summer's day, entitled A Now. 
He was with me while I was writing and reading it to him, 
and contributed one or two of the passages. Keats first pub- 
lished in the Indicator his beautiful poem La Belle Dame sans 
Mercy, and the Dream after reading Dante's Episode of Paulo 
and Francesca. Lord Holland, I was told, had a regard for 
the portraits of the Old Lady and the Old Gentleman, &c, 
which had appeared in the Examiner; and a late gallant 
captain in the navy was pleased to wonder how I became so 
well acquainted with seamen (in the article entitled Seamen on 
Shore). They had " sat to me" for their portraits. The 
common sailor was a son of my nurse at school, and the officer 
a connection of my own by marriage. 

Let me take this opportunity of recording my recollections 
in general of my friend Lamb ; of all the world's friend, par- 
ticularly of his oldest friends, Coleridge and Southey ; for 
I think he never modified or withheld any opinion (in private 
or bookwards) except in consideration of what he thought they 
might not like. 

Charles Lamb had a head worthy of Aristotle, with as fine 
a heart as ever beat in human bosom, and limbs very fragile 
to sustain it. There was a caricature of him sold in the 
shops, which pretended to be a likeness. Proctor went into 
the shop in a passion, and asked the man what he meant by 
putting forth such a libel. The man apologized, and said 
that the artist meant no offence. There never was a true 
portrait of Lamb. His features were strongly yet delicately 
cut : he had a fine eye as well as forehead ; and no face 
carried in it greater marks of thought and feeling. It resem- 
bled that of Bacon, with less worldly vigour and more sensi- 
bility. 

As his frame, so was his genius. It was as fit for thought 
as could be, and equally as unfit for action ; and this rendered 
him melancholy, apprehensive, humorous, and willing to 
make the best of everything as it was, both from tenderness 



KEATS, LA1TB, AND COLERIDGE. 251 

of heart and abhorrence of alteration. His understanding 
was too great to admit an absurdity ; his frame was not strong 
enough to deliver it from a fear. His sensibility to strong 
contrasts was the foundation of his humour, which was that 
of a wit at once melancholy and willing to be pleased. He 
would beard a superstition, and shudder at the old phantasm 
while he did it. One could have imagined him cracking a 
jest in the teeth of a ghost, and then melting into thin air 
himself, out of sympathy with the awful. His humour and 
his knowledge both, were those of Hamlet, of Moliere, of 
Carlin, who shook a city with laughter, and, in order to divert 
his melancholy, was recommended to go and hear himself. 
Yet he extracted a real pleasure out of his jokes, because 
good-heartedness retains that privilege when it fails in every- 
thing else. I should say he condescended to be a punster, if 
condescension had been a word befitting wisdom like his. 
Being told that somebody had lampooned him, he said, " Very 
well, I'll Lamb-pun him." His puns were admirable, and 
often contained as deep things as the wisdom of some who 
have greater names ; such a man, for instance, as Nicole, the 
Frenchman, who was a baby to him. Lamb would have 
cracked a score of jokes at Nicole, worth his whole book of 
sentences; pelted his head with pearls. Nicole would not 
have understood him, but Eochefoucault would, and Pascal 
too ; and some of our old Englishmen would have understood 
him still better. He would have been worthy of hearing 
Shakspeare read one of his scenes to him, hot from the brain. 
Commonplace found a great comforter in him, as long as it 
was good-natured; it was to the ill-natured or the dictatorial 
only that he was startling. Willing to see society go on as it 
did, because he despaired of seeing it otherwise, but not at all 
agreeing in his interior with the common notions of crime 
and punishment, he " dumbfounded " a long tirade against 
vice one evening, by taking the pipe out of his mouth, and 
asking the speaker, " Whether he meant to say that a thief 
was not a good man ? " To a person abusing Voltaire, and 
indiscreetly opposing his character to that of Jesus Christ, he 
said admirably well (though he by no means overrated Vol- i 
taire, nor wanted reverence in the other quarter), that " Vol- 1 
taire was a very good Jesus Christ for the French" He liked 
to see the church-goers continue to go to church, and wrote a 
tale in his sister's admirable little book {Mrs. Leicester's 
School) to encourage the rising generation to do so ; but to a 



252 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

t conscientious deist he had nothing to object; and if an atheist 
had found every other door shut against him, he would 
assuredly not have found his. I believe he would have had 
the world remain precisely as it was, provided it innovated no 
farther ; but this spirit in him was anything but a worldly 
one, or for his own interest. He hardly contemplated with 
patience the new buildings in the Regent's Park: and, pri- 
vately speaking, he had a grudge against official heaven- 
expounders, or clergymen. He would rather, however have 
been with a crowd that he disliked, than felt himself alone. 
He said to me one day, with a face of great solemnity, 
" What must have been that man's feelings, who thought him- 
self the first deist ? " Finding no footing in certainty, he 
delighted to confound the borders of theoretical truth and 
falsehood. He was fond of telling wild stories to children, 
engrafted on things about them; wrote letters to people 
abroad, telling them that a friend of theirs [Mr. Alsager, the 
commercial editor of the Times'] had come out in genteel 
comedy ; and persuaded George Dyer that Lord Castlereagh 

| was the author of Waverley ! The same excellent person 
walking one evening out of his friend's house into the New 
River, Lamb (who was from home at the time) wrote a paper 
under his signature of Elia, stating, that common friends 
would have stood dallying on the bank, have sent for neigh- 
bours, &c, but that he, in his magnanimity, jumped in, and 
rescued his friend after the old noble fashion. He wrote in 
the same magazine two lives of Liston and Munden, which 
the public took for serious, and which exhibit an extraordi- 
nary jumble of imaginary facts and truth of bye-painting. 
Munden he made born at " Stoke Pogis : " the very sound of 
which was like the actor speaking and digging his words. He 
knew how many false conclusions and pretensions are made 
by men who profess to be guided by facts only, as if facts 
could not be misconceived, or figments taken for them ; and 
therefore, one day, when somebody was speaking of a person 
who valued himself on being a matter-of-fact man, " Now," 
said he, "I value myself on being a matter-of-lie man." 
This did not hinder his being a man of the greatest veracity, 
in the ordinary sense of the word; but " truth," he said, 
\ " was precious, and not to be wasted on everybody." Those 
who wish to have a genuine taste of him, and an insight into 
his modes of life, should read his essays on Hogarth and 
King Lear, his Letters, his article on the London Streets, on 



KEATS, LAMB, AND COLERIDGE. 253 

Whist-Playing, which he loves, and on Saying Grace before 
Meat, which he thinks a strange moment to select for being 
grateful. He said once to a brother whist-player, whose hand 
was more clever than clean, and who had enough in him to 
afford the joke, " M., if dirt were trumps, what hands you 
would hold." [Another anecdote of Lamb his friend would 
relate with great gusto. While Leigh Hunt was living at 
Highgate, he used sometimes to be visited by his old school- 
fellow ; and Coleridge, who, it will be remembered, was 
Lamb's contemporary at Christ's Hospital, would sometimes 
supervene, and join for a short space in the walk and the con- 
versation, the talk being, as usual, chiefly appropriated by 
himself. One day the soliloquy thus poured into the ears of 
the two friends turned upon the blessings of faith, and it was 
both in tone and phraseology marked by the accepted dialect 
of the most " regenerated " orthodoxy : in short, what un- 
courteous or invidious persons might call canting. After the 
illustrious poet had taken his leave, Leigh Hunt exclaimed, 
in a tone of perplexed vexation, " What makes Coleridge talk 
in that way about heavenly grace, and the holy church , and 
that sort of thing ?" u Ah," replied Lamb, with the hearty 
tone of a man uttering an obvious truism, but struggling with 
his habitual stammer, " there is a g-g-reat deal of fun in 
Coleridge ! "] 

Lamb had seen strange faces of calamity ; but they did 
not make him love those of his fellow-creatures the less. Few 
persons guessed what he had suffered in the coiu*se of his life, 
till his friend Talfourd wrote an account of it, and showed 
the hapless warping that disease had given to the fine brain of 
his sister. 

I will append to this account of Lamb, though I had not 
the good fortune to know much of him personally, my im- 
pression respecting his friend Coleridge. 

Coleridge was as little fitted for action as Lamb, but on a 
different account. His person was of a good height, but as 
sluggish and solid as the other's was light and fragile. He 
had, perhaps, suffered it to look old before its time, for want 
of exercise. His hair was white at fifty ; and as he generally 
dressed in black, and had a very tranquil demeanour, his ap- 
pearance was gentlemanly, and for several years before his 
death was reverend. Nevertheless, there was something in- 
vincibly young in the look of his face. It was round and 
fresh -coloured, with agreeable features, and an open, indolent, 



254 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 



6 



good-natured mouth. This boy-like expression was very 
becoming in one who dreamed and speculated as he did when 
he was really a boy, and who passed his life apart from the 
rest of the world, with a book, and his flowers. His fore- 
head was prodigious — a great piece of placid marble; and his 
fine eyes, in which all the activity of his mind seemed to con- 
centrate, moved under it with a sprightly ease, as if it was 
pastime to them to carry all that thought. 

And it was pastime. Hazlitt said that Coleridge's genius 
appeared to him like a spirit, all head and wings, eternally 
floating about in etherealities. He gave me a different im- 
pression. I fancied him a good-natured wizard, very fond of 
earth, and conscious of reposing with weight enough in his 
easy chair, but able to conjure his etherealities about him in 
the twinkling of an eye. He could also change them by 
thousands, and dismiss them as easily when his dinner came. 
It was a mighty intellect put upon a sensual body ; and the 
reason why he did little more with it than talk and dream was, 
that it is agreeable to such a body to do little else. I do not 
mean that Coleridge was a sensualist in an ill sense. He was 
capable of too many innocent pleasures to take any pleasure 
in the way that a man of the world would take it. The idlest 
things he did would have had a warrant. But if all the senses, 
in their time, did not find lodging in that humane plenitude 
of his, never believe that they did in Thomson or in Boccaccio. 
Two affirmatives in him made a negative. He was very meta- 
physical and very corporeal; so in mooting everything, he 
said (so to speak) nothing. His brains pleaded all sorts of 
questions before him, and he heard them with too much im- 
partiality (his spleen not giving him any trouble), that he 
thought he might as well sit in his easy chair and hear them 
for ever, without coming to a conclusion. It has been said 
(indeed, he said himself) that he took opium to deaden the 
sharpness of his cogitations. I will venture to affirm, that if 
he ever took anything to deaden a sensation within him, it 
was for no greater or more marvellous reason than other 
people take it ; which is, because they do not take enough 
exercise, and so plague their heads with their livers. Opium, 
perhaps, might have settled an uneasiness of this sort in Cole- 
ridge, as it did in a much less man with a much greater body 
— the Shadwell of Dryden. He would then resume his natural 
ease, and sit, and be happy, till the want of exercise must be 
again supplied. The vanity of criticism, like all other vani- 



KEATS, LAMB, AND COLERIDGE. 255 

ties, except that of dress (which, so far, has an involuntary 
philosophy in it), is always forgetting that we are half made 
up of body. Hazlitt was angry with Coleridge for not being 
as zealous in behalf of progress as he used to be when young. 
I was sorry for it, too ; and if other men as well as Hazlitt 
had not kept me in heart, should have feared that the world 
was destined to be for ever lost, for want either of perseverance 
or calmness. But Coleridge had less right to begin his zeal 
in favour of liberty than he had to leave it off. He should 
have bethought himself, first, whether he had the courage not 
to get fat. 

As to the charge against him, of eternally probing the 
depths of his own mind, and trying what he could make of 
them beyond the ordinary pale of logic and philosophy, surely 
there was no harm in a man taking this new sort of experi- 
ment upon him, whatever little chance there may have been 
of his doing anything with it. Coleridge, after all, was but 
one man, though an extraordinary man : his faculties inclined 
him to the task, and were suitable to it ; and it is impossible 
to say what new worlds may be laid open, some day or other, 
by this apparently hopeless process. The fault of Coleridge, 
like that of all thinkers indisposed to action, was, that he was 
too content with things as they were, — at least, too fond of 
thinking that old corruptions were full of good things, if the 
world did but understand them. Now, here was the dilemma ; 
for it required an understanding like his own to refine upon 
and turn them to good as he might do ; and what the world 
requires is not metaphysical refinement, but a hearty use of 
good sense. Coleridge, indeed, could refine his meaning so 
as to accommodate it with great good-nature to every one that 
came across him ; and, doubtless, he found more agreement of 
intention among people of different opinions, than they them- 
selves were aware of; which it was good to let them see. 
But when not enchained by his harmony, they fell asunder 
again, or went and committed the greatest absurdities for want 
of the subtle connecting tie ; as was seen in the books of 
Mr. Irving, who, eloquent in one page, and reasoning in a 
manner that a child ought to be ashamed of in the next, ( 
thought to avail himself, in times like these, of the old menac- 
ing tones of damnation, without being considered a quack or 
an idiot, purely because Coleridge had shown him, last Friday, 
that damnation was not what its preachers took it for. With 
the same subtlety and good-nature of interpretation, Coleridge 



256 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

would persuade a deist that he was a Christian, and an atheist 
that he believed in God : all which would be very good, if 
the world could get on by it, and not remain stationary ; but, 
meanwhile, millions are wretched with having too little to eat, 
and thousands w r ith having too much ; and these subtleties 
are like people talking in their sleep, when they should be up 
and helping. 

However, if the world is to remain always as it is, give me 
to all eternity new talk of Coleridge, and new essays of Charles 
Lamb. They will reconcile it beyond all others : and that is 
much. 

Coleridge was fat, and began to lament, in very delightful 
verses, that he was getting infirm. There was no old age in 
his verses. I heard him one day, under the Grove at High- 
gate, repeat one of his melodious lamentations, as he walked 
up and down, his voice undulating in a stream of music, and 
his regrets of youth sparkling with visions ever young. At 
the same time, he did me the honour to show me that he did 
not think so ill of all modern liberalism as some might sup- 
pose, denouncing the pretensions of the money-getting in a 
style which I should hardly venture upon, and never could 
equal ; and asking with a triumphant eloquence what chastity 
itself were worth, if it were a casket, not to keep love in, but 
hate, and strife, and worldliness? On the same occasion, he 
built up a metaphor out of a flower, in a style surpassing the 
famous passage in Milton ; deducing it from its root in reli- 
gious mystery, and carrying it up into the bright, consum- 
mate flower, " the bridal chamber of reproductiveness." O: 
all " the Muse's mysteries," he was as great a high-priest as 
Spenser ; and Spenser himself might have gone to Highgatc 
to hear him talk, and thank him for his Ancient Mariner 
His voice did not always sound very sincere ; but perhaps the 
humble and deprecating tone of it, on those occasions, was 
out of consideration for the infirmities of his hearers, rathe: 
than produced by his own. He recited his Kubla Khan oik 
morning to Lord Byron, in his lordship's house in Piccadilly 
when I happened to be in another room. I remember th( 
other's coming away from him, highly struck with his poem 
and saying how wonderfully he talked. This was the impres- 
sion of everybody who heard him. 

It is no secret that Coleridge lived in the Grove at Highgat* 
with a friendly family, who had sense and kindness enough t( 
know that they did themselves honour by looking after the com- 



KEATS, LAMB, AND COLERIDGE. 257 

fort of such a man. His room looked upon a delicious prospect 
of wood and meadow, with coloured gardens under the win- 
dow, like an embroidery to the mantle. I thought, when I 
iirst saw it, that he had taken up his dwelling-place like an 
abbot. Here he cultivated his flow T ers, and had a set of birds 
for his pensioners, who came to breakfast with him. He 
might have been seen taking his daily stroll up and down, with 
his black coat and white locks, and a book in his hand; and 
was a great acquaintance of the little children. His main 
occupation, I believe, w r as reading. Pie loved to read old 
folios, and to make old voyages with Purchas and Marco 
Polo; the seas being in good visionary condition, and the 
vessel well stocked with botargoes.* 



CHAPTER XVII. 



VOYAGE TO ITALY. 



It was not at Hampstead that I first saw Keats. It was in 
York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), w r here I wrote part 
of the Indicator — and he resided with me while in Mortimer 
Terrace, Kentish Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I men- 
tion this for the curious in such things ; among whom I am one. 
I proceed to hasten over the declining fortunes of the 
Examiner, Politics different from ours were triumphing all 
over Europe ; public sympathy (not the most honourable cir- 
cumstance of its character) is apt to be too much qualified by 
fortune. Shelley, who had been for some time in Italy, had 
often invited me abroad; and I had as repeatedly declined 
going, for the reason stated in my account of him. That 
reason w r as done away by a proposal from Lord Byron to go 
and set up a liberal periodical publication in conjunction with 
them both. I was ill ; it w r as thought by many I could not 
live ; my wife was very ill too ; my family was numerous ; 
and it was agreed by my brother John, that while a struggle 
was made in England to reanimate the Examiner, a simulta- 
neous endeavour should be made in Italy to secure new aid to 

* For a more critical summary of .my opinions respecting Coleridge's 
poetry (which I take upon the whole to have heen the finest of its time; 
that is to say, the most quintessential, the most purely emanating from 
imaginative feeling, unadulterated by " thoughts " and manner), the 
reader may, if he pleases, consult Imagination and Fancy, p. 276. 

17 



258 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

our prospects, and new friends to the cause of liberty. My 
family, therefore, packed up such goods and chattels as they 
had a regard for, my books in particular, and we took, with 
strange new thoughts and feelings, but in high expectation, 
our journey by sea. 

It was not very discreet to go many hundred miles by sea 
in winter-time with a large family ; but a voyage was thought 
cheaper than a journey by land. Even that, however, was a 
mistake. It was by Shelley's advice that I acted; and, I 
believe, if he had recommended a balloon, I should have been 
inclined to try it. " Put your music and your books on 
board a vessel " (it was thus that he wrote to us), " and you 
will have no more trouble." The sea was to him a pastime ; 
he fancied us bounding over the waters, the merrier for being 
tossed ; and thought that our will would carry us through 
anything, as it ought to do, seeing that we brought with us 
nothing but good things, — books, music, and sociality. It is 
true, he looked to our coming in autumn, and not in winter; 
and so we should have done, but for the delays of the captain. 
We engaged to embark in September, and did not set off till 
November the 16th. 

I have often thought that a sea-voyage, which is generally 
the dullest thing in the world, both in the experiment and the 
description, might be turned to different account on paper, 
if the narrators, instead of imitating the dulness of their pre- 
decessors, and recording that it was four o'clock p.m. when 
they passed Cape St. Vincent, and that on such-and-such - 
a-day they beheld a porpoise or a Dutchman, would look into 
the interior of the floating-house they inhabited, and tell us 
about the seamen and their modes of living; what adventures 
they have had, — their characters and opinions, — how they 
eat, drink, and sleep, &c; what they do in fine weather, and 
how they endure the sharpness, the squalidness, and incon- 
ceivable misery of bad. With a large family around me to 
occupy my mind, I did not think of this till too late: but I 
am sure that this mode of treating the subject would be inter- 
esting ; and what I remember to such purpose, I will set down. 

Our vessel was a small brig of a hundred and twenty tons 
burden, a good tight sea-boat, nothing more. Its cargo con- 
sisted of sugar ; but it took in also a surreptitious stock of 
gunpowder, to the amount of fifty barrels, which was destined 
for Greece. Of this intention we knew nothing, till the 
barrels were sent on board from a place up the river; other- 



VOYAGE TO ITALY. 259 

wise, so touchy a companion would have been objected to, 
my wife, who was in a shattered state of health, never ceasing 
to entertain apprehensions on account of it, except when the 
storms that came upon us presented a more obvious peril. 
There were nine men to the crew, including the mate. We 
numbered almost as many souls, though with smaller bodies, 
in the cabin, which we had entirely to ourselves ; as well we 
might, for it was small enough. 

On the afternoon of the 15th of November (1821), we 
took leave of some friends, who accompanied us on board ; 
and next morning were awakened by the motion of the vessel 
making its way through the shipping in the river. The new 
life in which we thus, as it were, found ourselves enclosed, 
the clanking of iron, and the cheerly cries of the seamen, 
together with the natural vivacity of the time of day, pre- 
sented something animating to our feelings ; but while we 
thus moved off, not without encouragement, we felt that the 
friend whom we were going to see was at a great distance, 
while others were very near, whose hands it would be a long 
while before we should touch again, perhaps never. We 
hastened to get up and busy ourselves ; and great as well as 
small found a novel diversion in the spectacle that presented 
itself from the deck, our vessel threading its way through the 
others with gliding bulk. 

The next day it blew strong from the south-east, and even 
in the river (the navigation of which is not easy) we had a 
foretaste of the alarms and bad weather that awaited us at 
sea. The pilot, whom we had taken in over-night (and who 
was a jovial fellow with a whistle like a blackbird, which, in 
spite of the dislike that sailors have to whistling, he was 
always indulging), thought it prudent to remain at anchor till 
two in the afternoon ; and at six, a vessel meeting us carried 
away the jib-boom, and broke in one of the bulwarks. My 
wife, who had had a respite from the most alarming part of 
her illness, and whom it was supposed that a sea-voyage, even 
in winter, might benefit, again expectorated blood with the 
fright ; and I began to regret that I had brought my family 
into this trouble. — Even in the river we had a foretaste of the 
sea ; and the curse of being at sea to a landsman is, that you 
know nothing of what is going forward, and can take no active 
part in getting rid of your fears. You cannot " lend a hand." 
The business of these small vessels is not carried on with the 
orderliness and tranquillity of greater ones, or of men-of-war. 

17—2 



260 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIOH HUNT. 

The crew are not very wise ; the captain does not know how 
to make them so; the storm roars; the vessel pitches and 
reels; the captain, over your head, stamps and swears, and 
announces all sorts of catastrophes. Think of a family hear- 
ing all this, and parents in alarm for their children ! 

On Monday, the 19th, we passed the Nore, and proceeded 
down Channel amidst rains and squalls. We were now out at 
sea; and a rough taste we had of it. I had been three times 
in the Channel before, once in hard weather ; but I was then 
a bachelor, and had only myself to think of. Let the reader 
picture to his imagination the little back-parlour of one of 
the shops in Fleet Street or the Strand, attached or let into 
a great moving vehicle, and tumbling about the waves from 
side to side, now sending all the things that are loose this 
way, and now that. This will give him an idea of a cabin at 
sea, such as we occupied. It had a table fastened down in 
the middle ; places let into the walls on each side, one over 
the other, to hold beds; a short, wide, sloping window, carried 
off over a bulk, and looking out to sea, closed in bad weather, 
and a skylight, also closed in the worst storms ; a bench, or 
locker, running under the bulk from one side of the cabin to 
the other ; and a little fireplace opposite, in which it was 
impossible to keep a fire on account of the wind. The 
weather, at the same time, was bitterly cold, as well as wet. 
On one side of the fireplace was the door, and on the other 
a door leading into a petty closet dignified with the title of the 
state-room. In this room we put our servant, the captain 
sleeping in another closet outside. The berths were occupied 
by the children, and my wife and myself lay, as long as we 
could manage to do so, on the floor. Such was the trim, with 
boisterous wet weather, cold days, and long evenings, on which 
we set out on our sea-adventure. 

At six o'clock in the evening of the 19th, we came to in 
the Downs, on a line with Sandown Castle. The wind during 
the night increasing to a gale, the vessel pitched and laboured 
considerably ; and the whole of the next day it blew a strong 
gale, with hard squalls from the westward. The day after, 
the weather continuing bad, the captain thought proper to run 
for Eamsgate, and took a pilot for that purpose. 

We stopped for a change of weather nearly three weeks at 
Eamsgate, where we had visits from more than one London 
friend, to whom I only wish we could give a tenth part of the 
consolation when they are in trouble, which they afforded to 



VOYAGE TO ITALY. 261 

us. At Eamsgate I picked up Condorcet's View of the Pro- 
gress of Society, which I read with a transport of gratitude to 
the author, though it had not entered so deeply into the mat- 
ter as I supposed. But the very power to persevere in hopes 
for mankind, at a time of life when individuals are in the 
habit of reconciling their selfishness and fatigue by choosing 
to think ill of them, is a great good to any man, and achieves 
a great good if it act only upon one other person. Such in- 
stances of perseverance beget more ; and it is these that alter 
the world. 

For some days we remained on board, as it was hoped that 
we should be able to set sail again. Eamsgate harbour is 
very shallow ; and though we lay in the deepest part of it, 
the vessel took to a new and ludicrous species of dance, grind- 
ing and thumping upon the chalky ground. The consequence 
was, that the metal pintles of the rudder were all broken, 
and new ones obliged to be made ; which the sailors told us 
was very lucky, as the rudder was thus proved not to be in a 
good condition, and it might have deserted us at sea. 

We lay next a French vessel, smaller than our own, the 
crew of which became amusing subjects of remark. They 
were always whistling, singing, and joking. The men shaved 
themselves elaborately, cultivating heroic whiskers ; and they 
strutted up and down, when at leisure, with their arms folded, 
and the air of naval officers. A woman or two, with kerchiefs 
and little curls, completed the picture. They all seemed very 
merry and good-humoured. 

At length, tired of waiting on board, we took a quiet lodg- 
ing at the other end of the town, and were pleased to find 
ourselves sitting still, and secure of a good rest at night. It 
is something, after being at sea, to find oneself not running 
the fork in one's eye at dinner, or suddenly sliding down the 
floor to the other end of the room. My wife was in a very 
weak state ; but the rest she took was deep and tranquil, and 
I resumed my walks. 

Few of the principal bathing-places have anything worth 
looking at in the neighbourhood, and Eamsgate has less than 
most. Pegwell Bay is eminent for shrimps. Close by was 
Sir William Garrow, and a little farther on was Sir William 
Curtis. The sea is a grand sight, but it becomes tiresome 
and melancholy — a great monotonous idea ; at least one thinks 
so, when not happy. I was destined to see it grander, and 
dislike it more. With great injustice ; for all the works of 



262" AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUKT. 

nature are beautiful, and their beauty is not to be subjected 
to our petty vicissitudes. 

On Tuesday, the 11th of December, we set forth again, in 
company with nearly a hundred vessels, the white sails of 
which, as they shifted and presented themselves in different 
quarters, made an agreeable spectacle, exhibiting a kind of 
noble minuet. My wife w r as obliged to be carried down to 
the pier in a sedan ; and the taking leave, a second time, of 
a dear friend, rendered our new departure a melancholy one. 
I would have stopped and waited for summer-time, had not 
circumstances rendered it advisable for us to persevere ; and 
my wife herself fully agreed with me, and even hoped for 
benefit, as well as a change of weather. 

Unfortunately, the promise to that effect lasted us but a 
day. The winds recommenced the day following, and there 
ensued such a continuity and vehemence of bad weather as 
rendered the winter of 1821 memorable in the shipping 
annals. It strewed the whole of the north-western coast of 
Europe w T ith wrecks. Some readers may remember that 
winter. It was the one in which Mount Hecla burst out into 
flame, and Dungeness Lighthouse was struck with lightning. 
The mole at Genoa was dilapidated. Next year there were 
between fourteen and fifteen hundred sail less upon Lloyd's 
books ; which, valued at an average at 1,500/., made a loss of 
two millions of money — the least of all the losses, consider- 
ing the feelings of survivors. Fifteen hundred sail (colliers) 
were wrecked on the single coast of Jutland. Of this tur- 
moil we were destined to have a sufficient experience. 

Two days after we left Eamsgate, the wind blowing violently 
from the south-west, we were under close-reefed topsails ; but 
on its veering to westward, the captain was induced to perse- 
vere, in hopes that by coming round to the north-west, it 
would enable him to clear the Channel. The ship laboured 
very much, the sea breaking over her; and the pump was con- 
stantly going. 

The next day, the 14th, we shipped a great deal of water, 
the pump going as before. The fore-topsail and foresail were 
taken in ; the storm-staysail set ; and the captain said we were 
" in the hands of God.' 1 We now wore ship to southward. 

On the 15th, the weather was a little moderated, with fresh 
gales and cloudy. The captain told us to-day how his hair 
turned white in a shipwreck; and the mate entertained us with 
an account of the extraordinary escape of himself and some 



VOYAGE TO ITALY. 2G3 

6thers from an American pirate, who seized their vessel, plun- 
dered and made it a wreck, and confined them under the 
hatches, in the hope of their going down with it. They escaped 
in a rag of a boat, and were taken up by a Greek vessel, which 
treated them with the greatest humanity. The pirate was 
afterwards taken and hanged at Malta, with five of his men. 
This story, being tragical without being tempestuous, and ter- 
minating happily for our friend, was very welcome, and occu- 
pied us agreeably. I tried to elicit some ghost stories of 
vessels, but could hear of nothing but the Flying Dutchman; 
nor did I succeed better on another occasion. This dearth of 
supernatural adventure is remarkable, considering the super- 
stition of sailors. But their wits are none of the liveliest; the 
sea blunts while it mystifies ; and the sailor's imagination, 
driven in, like his body, to the vessel he inhabits, admits only 
the petty wonders that come directly about him in the shape 
of storm-announcing fishes and birds. His superstition is that 
of a blunted and not of an awakened ignorance. Sailors had 
rather sleep than see visions. 

On the 16th, the storm was alive again, with strong gales 
and heavy squalls. "We set the fore storm-staysail anew, and 
at night the jolly-boat was torn from the stern. 

The afternoon of the 17th brought us the gale that lasted 
fifty-six hours, "one of the most tremendous," the captain 
said, " that he had ever witnessed." All the sails were taken 
in, except the close-reefed topsail and one of the trysails. At 
night, the wind being at south-west, and Scilly about fifty 
miles north by east, the trysail sheet was carried away, and 
the boom and sail had a narrow escape. We were now con- 
tinually wearing ship. The boom was unshipped, as it was; 
and it was a melancholy sight to see it lying next morning, 
with the sail about it, like a wounded servant who had been 
fighting. The morning was occupied in getting it to rights.. 
At night we had hard squalls with lightning. 

We lay-to under main- topsail until the next morning, the 
19th, when at ten o'clock we were enabled to set the reefed 
foresail, and the captain prepared to run for Falmouth; but 
finding he could not get in till night, we hauled to the wind, 
and at three in the afternoon, wore ship to south-westward. 
It was then blowing heavily ; and the sea, breaking over the 
vessel, constantly took with it a part of the bulwark. I be- 
lieve we had long ceased to have a duck alive. Our poor 
goat had contrived to find itself a corner in the long-boat, and 



264 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. 

lay frightened and shivering under a piece of canvas. I after- 
wards took it down in the cabin to share our lodging; but not 
having a berth to give it, it passed a sorry time, tied up and 
slipping about the floor. At night we had lightning again, 
with hard gales, the wind being west and north-west, and 
threatening to drive us on the French coast. It was a grand 
thing, through the black and turbid atmosphere, to see the 
great fiery eye of the lighthouse at the Lizard Point : it looked 
like a good genius with a ferocious aspect. Ancient mythology 
would have made dragons of these noble structures, — dragons 
with giant glare, warning the seaman off the coast. 

The captain could not get into Falmouth : so he wore ship, 
and stood to the westward with fresh hopes, the wind having 
veered a little to the north ; but, after having run above fifty 
miles to the south and west, the wind veered again in our teeth, 
and at two o'clock on the 20th, we were reduced to a close- 
reefed main-topsail, which, being new, fortunately held, the 
wind blowing so hard that it could not be taken in without 
the greatest risk of losing it. The sea was very heavy, and the 
rage of the gale tremendous, accompanied with lightning. 
The children on these occasions slept, unconscious of their 
danger. My wife slept, too, from exhaustion. I remember, 
as I lay awake that night, looking about to see what help I 
could get from imagination, to furnish a moment's respite from 
the anxieties that beset me, I cast my eyes on the poor goat ; 
and recollecting how she devoured some choice biscuit I gave 
her one day, I got up, and going to the cupboard took out as 
much as I could find, and occupied myself in seeing her eat. 
She munched the fine white biscuit out of my hand, with equal 
appetite and comfort ; and I thought of a saying of Sir Philip 
Sidney's, that we are never perfectly miserable when we can 
do a good-natured action. 

" A large vessel is coming right down upon us ; — lights — 
lights !" This was the cry at eleven o'clock at night, on the 
21st December, the gale being tremendous, and the sea to 
match. Lanthorns were handed up from the cabin, and, one 
after the other, put out. The captain thought it was owing 
to the weather ; but it was the drunken steward, who jolted 
them out as he took them up the ladder. We furnished more, 
and contrived to see them kept in ; and the captain afterwards 
told me that we had saved his vessel. The ship, discerning us 
just in time, passed ahead, looking very huge and terrible. 
Next morning, we saw her about two miles on our lee-bow, 



VOYAGE TO ITALY. 265 

lying-to under trysails. It was an Indiaman. There was an- 
other vessel, a smaller, near us in the night. I thought the 
Indiaman looked very comfortable, with its spacious and power- 
ful body : but the captain said we were better off a great deal 
in our own sea-boat ; which turned out to be too true, if this 
was the same Indiaman, as some thought it, which was lost the 
night following off the coast of Devonshire. The crew said, 
that in one of the pauses of the wind they heard a vessel go 
down. We were at that time near land. While drinking tea, 
the keel of our ship grated against something, perhaps a shoal. 
The captain afterwards very properly made light of it ; but at 
the time, being in the act of raising a cup to his mouth, I re- 
member he turned very grave, and, getting up, went upon deck. 
Next day, the 22nd, we ran for Dartmouth, and succeeding 
this time, found ourselves, at twelve o'clock at noon, in the 
middle of Dartmouth harbour, — 

" Magno telluris amore 
Egressi, optata potiuntur Troes arena." 

We left Dartmouth, where no ships were in the habit of 
sailing for Italy, and went to Plymouth ; intending to set off 
again with the beginning of spring, in a vessel bound for 
Genoa. But the mate of it, who, I believe, grudged us the 
room we should deprive him of, contrived to tell my wife a 
number of dismal stories, both of the ship and its captain, who 
was an unlucky fellow that seemed marked by fortune. Misery 
had also made him a Caivinist, — the most miserable of all ways 
of getting comfort ; and this was no additional recommendation. 
To say the truth, having a pique against my fears on the former 
occasion, I was more bent on allowing myself to have none on 
the present ; otherwise, I should not have thought of putting 
forth again till the fine weather was complete. But the rea- 
sons that prevailed before, had now become still more impera- 
tive ; my wife being confined to her bed, and undergoing 
repeated bleedings ; so, till summer we waited. 

The sea upon the whole had done me good, and I found 
myself able to write again, though by driblets. We lived 
very quietly at Stonehouse, opposite Mount -Edgecumbe, 
nursing our hopes for a new voyage, and expecting one of a 
very different complexion, in sailing towards an Italian sum- 
mer. My wife kept her bed almost the whole time, and lost 
a great deal of blood ; but the repose, together with the sea- 
air, was of service to her, and enabled her to receive benefit 
on resuming our journey. 



266 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Thus quietly we lived, and thus should have continued, 
agreeably to both of our inclinations ; but some friends of the 
Examiner heard of our being in the neighbourhood, and the 
privatest of all public men (if I may be ranked among the 
number) found himself complimented by his readers, face to 
face, and presented with a silver cup. I then had a taste of the 
Plymouth hospitality, and found it friendly and cordial to the 
last degree, as if the seamen's atmosphere gave a new spirit 
to the love of books and liberty. Nor, as the poet would 
say, was music wanting; nor fair faces, the crown of wel- 
come. Besides the landscapes in the neighbourhood, I had 
the pleasure of seeing some beautiful ones in the painting- 
room of Mr. Rogers, a very clever artist and intelligent man, 
who has travelled, and can think for himself. But my great 
Examiner friend, who afterwards became a personal one, was 
Mr. Hine, subsequently master of an academy near the 
metropolis, and the most attentive and energetic person of 
his profession that I ever met with. My principal visitors, 
indeed, at Plymouth consisted of schoolmasters ; — one of 
those signs of the times which has not been so ill regarded 
since the accession of a lettered and liberal minister to the 
government of this country, as they were under the superci- 
lious ignorance, and (to say the truth) well-founded alarm of 
some of his predecessors. 

The Devonshire people, as far as I had experience of them, 
were pleasant and good-humoured. Queen Elizabeth said of 
their gentry, that they were " all born courtiers with a be- 
coming confidence." I know not how that may be, though 
she had a good specimen in Sir Walter Raleigh. But the 
private history of modern times might exhibit instances of 
natives of Devonshire winning their way into regard and 
power by the force of a well-constituted mixture of sweet 
and strong ; and it is curious that the milder climate of that 
part of England should have produced more painters, perhaps, 
of a superior kind, than any other two counties can show. 
Drake, Jewel, Hooker, and old Fortescue, were also Devon- 
shire-men ; William Browne, the most genuine of Spenser's 
disciples; and Gay, the enjoying and the good-hearted, the 
natural man in the midst of the sophisticate. 

We left Plymouth on the 13th of May, 1822, accompanied 
by some of our new friends who would see us on board; and 
set sail in a fresh vessel, on our new summer voyage, a very 
different one from the last. Short acquaintances sometimes 



VOYAGE TO ITALY. 267 

cram as much into their intercourse, as to take the footing 
of long ones ; and our parting was not without pain. An- 
other shadow was cast on the female countenances by the 
observation of our boatman, who, though an old sailor who 
ought to have known better, bade us remark how heavily laden 
our ship was, and how deep she lay in the water : so little can 
ignorance afford to miss an opportunity of being important. 

Our new captain, and, I believe, all his crew, were Welsh, 
with the exception of one sailor, an unfortunate Scotchman, 
who seemed pitched among them to have his nationality put 
to the torture. Jokes were unceasingly cracked on the length 
of his person, the oddity of his dialect, and the uncouth 
manner in which he stood at the helm. It was a new thing 
to hear Welshmen cutting up the barbarism of the " Modern 
Athens ; " but they had the advantage of the poor fellow in 
wit, and he took it with a sort of sulky patience, that showed 
he was not destitute of one part of the wisdom of his coun- 
trymen. To have made a noise would have been to bring 
down new shouts of laughter ; so he pocketed the affronts as 
well as he might, and I could not help fancying that his 
earnings lay in the same place more securely than those of the 
others about him. The captain was choleric and brusque, a 
temperament which was none the better for an inclination to 
plethora; but his enthusiasm in behalf of his brother tars, 
and the battles they had fought, was as robust as his frame ; 
and he surprised us with writing verses on the strength of it. 
Very good heart and impart verses they were, too, and would 
cut as good a figure as any in the old magazines. While he 
read them, he rolled the r's in the most rugged style, and 
looked as if he could have run them down the throats of the 
enemy. The objects of his eulogy he called " our gallant 
herroes." 

We took leave of Plymouth with a fine wind at north-east; 
and next day, on the confines of the Channel, spoke the Two 
Sisters of Guernsey, from Eio Janeiro. On a long voyage 
ships lose their longitude; and our information enabled the 
vessel to enter the Channel with security. Ships approach- 
ing and parting from one another present a fine spectacle, 
shifting in the light, and almost looking conscious of the grace 
of their movements. 

We were now on the high Atlantic, with fresh health and 
hopes, and the prospect of an easy voyage before us. Next 
night, the 15th, we saw, for the first time, two grampuses, 



268 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

who interested us extremely with their unwieldy gambols. 
They were very large — in fact, a small "kind of whale; but 
they played about the vessel like kittens, dashing round, and 
even under it, as if in scorn of its progress. The swiftness 
of fish is inconceivable. The" smallest of them must be 
enormously strong : the largest are as gay as the least. One 
of these grampuses fairly sprang out of the water, bolt upright. 

The same day, we were becalmed in the Bay of Biscay — 
a pleasant surprise. A calm in the Bay of Biscay, after what 
we had read and heard of it, sounded to us like repose in a 
boiling cauldron. But a calm, after all, is not repose : it is a 
very unresting and unpleasant thing, the ship taking a great 
gawky motion from side to side, as if playing the buffoon ; 
and the sea heaving in huge oily-looking fields, like a carpet 
lifted. Sometimes it appears to be striped into great ribbons ; 
but the sense of it is always more or less unpleasant, and to 
impatient seamen is torture. 

The next day we were still becalmed. A small shark 
played all day long about the vessel, but was shy of the bait. 
The sea was swelling, and foul with putrid substances, which 
made us think what it would be if a calm continued a month. 
Coleridge has touched upon that matter, with the hand of a 
master, in his Ancient Mariner. (Here are three words in 
one sentence beginning with m and ending with r, to the great 
regret of fingers that cannot always stop to make corrections. 
But the compliment to Coleridge shall be the greater, since 
it is at my own expense.) During a calm, the seamen, that 
they may not be idle, are employed in painting the vessel — 
an operation that does not look well, amidst the surrounding 
aspect of sickness and faintness. The favourite colours are 
black and yellow ; I believe, because they are the least ex- 
pensive. The combination is certainly the most ugly. There 
are shades of darkness and yellowness that look well together 
in certain materials and under certain circumstances, as in 
the case of dark-haired beauties attired in garments of daf- 
fodil or jonquil; but in great broad stripes upon ships, the 
effect is nothing but a coarse combination of the glaring 
and the sombre. 

On the 17th, we had a fine breeze at north-east. There 
is great enjoyment in a beautiful day at sea. You quit all 
the discomforts of your situation for the comforts ; inter- 
change congratulations with the seamen, who are all in good 
humour; seat yourself at ease on the deck, enjoy the motion, 



VOYAGE TO ITALY. 269 

the getting on, the healthiness of the air ; watch idly for new 
sights ; read a little, or chat, or give way to a day-dream ; 
then look up again, and expatiate on the basking scene around 
you, with its ripples of blue and green, or of green and gold 
— what the old poet beautifully calls the innumerable smile of 
the waters. 

" TLOVTIUJV TS KVflCLT(t)V 

AvrjpiBfiov ysXacrjua." 

Prometheus Vinctus. 

The appearance of another vessel sets conjecture alive: it is 
" a Dane," "a Frenchman," "a Portuguese;" and these 
words have a new effect upon us, as though we suddenly 
became intimate with the country to which they belong. A 
more striking effect of the same sort is produced by the sight 
of a piece of land; it is Flamborough Head, Ushant, Cape 
Ortegal : — you see a part of another country, one perhaps on 
which you have never set foot ; and even this is a great thing : 
it gives you an advantage; others have read of Spain or 
Portugal; you have seen it, and are a grown man and a tra- 
veller, compared with those little children of books. These 
novelties affect the dullest ; but to persons of any imagination, 
and such as are ready for any pleasure or consolation that 
nature offers them, they are like pieces of a new morning of 
life. The world seems begun again, and our stock of know- 
ledge recommencing on a new plan. 

Then at night-time, there are those beautiful fires on the 
water. In a fine blue sea, the foam caused by the ship at 
night seems full of stars. The white fermentation, with 
golden sparkles in it, is beautiful beyond conception. You 
look over the side of the vessel, and devour it with your eyes, 
as you would so much ethereal syllabub. Finally, the stars 
in the firmament issue forth, and the moon ; always the more 
lovely the farther you get south. Or when there is no moon 
on the sea, the shadows at a little distance become grander 
and more solemn, and you watch for some huge fish to lift 
himself in the middle of them — a darker mass, breathing and 
spouting water. 

On the 21st, after another two days of calm, and one of 
rain, we passed Cape Finisterre. There was a heavy swell 
and rolling. Being now on the Atlantic, with not even any 
other name for the part of it that we sailed over to interrupt 
the widest association of ideas, I thought of America, and 
Columbus, and the chivalrous squadrons that set out from 



270 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Lisbon, and the old Atlantis of Plato, formerly supposed to exist 
off the coast of Portugal. It is curious that the Portuguese 
have a tradition to this day that there is an island occasionally 
seen off the coast of Lisbon. The story of the Atlantis looks 
like some old immemorial tradition of a country that has 
really existed; nor is it difficult to suppose that there was 
formerly some great tract of land, or even continent, occupy- 
ing these now watery regions, when we consider the fluctua- 
tion of things, and those changes of dry to moist, and of lofty 
to low, which are always taking place all over the globe. 
Off the coast of Cornwall, the mariner, it has been said, now 
rides over the old country of Lyones, or whatever else it was 
called, if that name be fabulous ; and there are stories of 
doors and casements, and other evidences of occupation, 
brought up from the bottom. These, indeed, have lately 
been denied, or reduced to nothing: but old probabilities 
remain. In the eastern seas the gigantic work of creation is 
visibly going on by means of those little creatures, the coral 
worms; and new lands will as assuredly be inhabited there 
after a lapse of centuries, as old ones have vanished in the west. 

u So, in them all, raignes mutabilities 

22nd. Fine breeze to-day from the N.E. A great shark 
went by. One longs to give the fellow a great dig in the 
mouth. Yet he is only going " on his vocation. 1 ' Without 
him, as without the vultures on land, something would be 
amiss. It is only moral pain and inequality which it is 
desirable to alter — that which the mind of man has an 
invincible tendency to alter. 

To-day the seas reminded me of the " marmora pelagi " of 
Catullus (the "marbles of the ocean"). They looked, at a 
little distance, like blue water petrified. You might have 
supposed, that by some sudden catastrophe the mighty main 
had been turned into stone; and the huge animals, whose 
remains we find in it, fixed there for ever. 

A shoal of porpoises broke up the fancy. Waves might be 
classed, as clouds have been; and more determination given 
to pictures of them. We ought to have waves and wavelets, 
billows, fluctuosities, &c, a marble sea, a sea weltering. The 
sea varies its look at the immediate side of the vessel, accord- 
ing as the progress is swift or slow. Sometimes it is a crisp 
and rapid flight, hissing ; sometimes an interweaving of the 
foam in snake-like characters ; sometimes a heavy weltering 



VOYAGE TO ITALY. 271 

shouldering the ship on this side and that. In what is called 
"the trough of the sea," which is a common state to be in 
during violent weather, the vessel literally appears stuck and 
labouring in a trough, the sea looking on either side like a 
hill of yeast. This was the gentlest sight we used to have in 
the Channel; very different from our summer amenities. I 
never saw what are called waves " mountains high." It is a 
figure of speech ; and a very violent one. 

23rd. A strong breeze from the N. and N.E., with clouds 
and rain. The foam by the vessel's side was full of those 
sparkles I have mentioned, like stars in clouds of froth. On 
the 24th the breeze increased, but the sky was fairer, and 
the moon gave a light. We drank the health of a friend in 
England, whose birthday it was ; being great observers of 
that part of religion. The 25th brought us beautiful weather, 
with a wind right from the north, so that we ran down the 
" remainder of the coast of Portugal in high style. Just as we 
desired it, too, it changed to N.W., so as to enable us to turn 
the Strait of Gibraltar merrily. Cape St. Vincent (where 
the battle took place), just before you come to Gibraltar, is 
a beautiful lone promontory jutting out upon the sea, and 
crowned with a convent. It presented itself to my eyes the 
first thing when I came upon deck in the morning, clear, 
solitary, blind-looking ; feeling, as it were, the sea air and 
the solitude for ever, like something between stone and spirit. 
It reminded me of a couplet, written not long before, of 
" Ghastly castle, that eternally 
Holds its blind visage out to the lone sea." 

Such things are beheld in one's day-dreams, and we are 
almost startled to find them real. 

Gibraltar has a noble look, tall, hard, and independent. 
But you do not wish to live there: it is a fortress, and an 
insulated rock ; and such a place is but a prison. The 
inhabitants feed luxuriously with the help of their fruits 
and smugglers. 

The first sight of Africa is an achievement. Yoyagers in 
our situation are obliged to be content with a mere sight of 
it; but that is much. They have seen another quarter of the 
globe. " Africa I " They look at it, and repeat the word, 
till the whole burning and savage territory, with its black 
inhabitants and its lions, seems put into their possession. 
Ceuta and Tangier bring the old Moorish times before you; 
"Ape's Hill," which is pointed out, sounds fastastic and 



272 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

remote, "a wilderness of monkeys;" and as all shores on 
which you do not clearly distinguish objects have a solemn and 
romantic look, you get rid of the petty effect of those vaga- 
bond Barbary States that occupy the coast, and think at once of 
Africa, the country of deserts and wild beasts, the " dry-nurse 
of lions," as Horace, with a vigour beyond himself, calls it. 

At Gibraltar you first have a convincing proof of the rarity 
of the southern atmosphere in the near look of the Straits, 
which seem but a few miles across, though they are thirteen. 

But what a crowd of thoughts face one on entering the 
Mediterranean ! Grand as the sensation is in passing through 
the classical and romantic memories of the sea off the western 
coast of the Peninsula, it is little compared with this. Count- 
less generations of the human race, from three quarters of the 
world, with all the religions, and the mythologies, and the 
genius, and the wonderful deeds, good and bad, that have 
occupied almost the whole attention of mankind, look you in 
the face from the galleries of that ocean-floor, rising one 
above another, till the tops are lost in heaven. The water 
at your feet is the same water that bathes the shores of 
Europe, of Africa, and of Asia — of Italy and Greece, and the 
Holy Land, and the lands of chivalry and romance, and 
pastoral Sicily, and the Pyramids, and Old Crete, and the 
Arabian city of Al Cairo, glittering in the magic lustre of the 
Thousand and One Nights. This soft air in your face comes 
from the grove of " Daphne by Orontes; " these lucid waters, 
that part from before you like oil, are the same from which 
Venus arose, pressing them out of her hair. In that quarter 
Vulcan fell — 

" Dropt from the zenith like a falling star :" 

and there is Circe's Island, and Calypso's, and the promontory 
of Plato, and Ulysses wandering, and Cymon and Miltiades 
fighting, and Eegulus crossing the sea to Carthage, and 

" Damasco and Morocco, and Trebisond ; 
And whom Biserta sent from Afric shore, 
When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell 
By Fontarabia." 

The mind hardly separates truth from fiction in thinking of 
all these things, nor does it wish to do so. Fiction is Truth 
in another shape, and gives as close embraces. You may 
shut a door upon a ruby, and render it of no colour ; but the 
colour shall not be the less enchanting for that, when the sun, 



YOYAGE TO ITALY. 273 

the poet of the world, touches it with his golden pen. What 
we glow at and shed tears over, is as real as love and pity. 

27th. Almost a calm. We proceeded at no greater rate than 
a mile an hour. I kept repeating to myself the word " Medi- 
terranean ; " not the word in prose, but the word in verse, as 
it stands at the beginning of the line : 

" And the sea 
Mediterranean." 

We saw the mountains about Malaga, topped with snow. 
Velez Malaga is probably the place at which Cervantes landed 
on his return from captivity at Algiers. (See Don Quixote, 
vol. ii.) I had the pleasure of reading the passage, while 
crossing the line betwixt the two cities. It is something to 
sail by the very names of Granada and Andalusia. There 
was a fine sunset over the hills of Granada. I imagined it 
lighting up the Alhambra. The clouds were like great wings 
of gold and yellow and rose-colour, with a smaller minute 
sprinkle in one spot, like a shower of glowing stones from a 
volcano. You see very faint imitations of such lustre in 
England. A heavy dew succeeded ; and a contrary wind at 
south-east, but very mild. At night, the reflection of the 
moon on the water was like silver snakes. 

30th. Passed Cape de Gata. My wife was very ill, but 
observed that illness itself was not illness, compared to what 
she experienced in the winter voyage. She never com- 
plained, summer or winter. It is very distressing not to be 
able to give perfect comfort to patients of this generous 
description. The Mediterranean Sea, after the Channel, wa3 
like a basin of gold fish ; but when the winds are contrary, 
the waves of it have a short uneasy motion, that fidget 
the vessel, and make one long for the nobler billows of the 
Atlantic. The wind, too, was singularly unpleasant, — moist 
and feverish. It continued contrary for several days, but 
became more agreeable, and sank almost into a calm on the 
3rd of June. 

The books with which I chiefly amused myself in the 
Mediterranean, were Don Quixote (for reasons which will be 
obvious to the reader), Ariosto and Berni (for similar reasons, 
their heroes having to do with the coasts of France and 
Africa), and Bayle's admirable Essay on Comets, which I 
picked up at Plymouth. It is the book that put an end to 
the superstition about comets. It is full of amusement, like 

18 



274 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

all his dialectics ; and holds together a perfect chain-armour 
of logic, the handler of which may cut his fingers with it at 
every turn, almost every link containing a double edge. A 
generation succeeds quietly to the good done it by such 
works, and its benefactor's name is sunk in the washy pre- 
tensions of those whom he has enriched. As to what seems 
defective in Bayle on the score of natural piety, the reader 
may supply that. A benevolent work, tending to do away 
real dishonour to things supernatural, will be no hindrance to 
any benevolent addition which others can bring it ; nor would 
Bayle, with his good-natured face, and the scholarly sim- 
plicity of his life, have found fault with it. But he was a 
soldier, after his fashion, with qualities, both positive and 
negative, fit to keep him one ; and some things must be dis- 
pensed with on the side of what is desirable, for the sake of 
the part that is taken in the overthrow of what is detestable. 
Him whom inquisitors hate, angels may love. 

7th. Saw the Colombrettes, and the land about Tortosa. 
Here commences the ground of Italian romance. It was on 
this part of the west of Spain, that the Paynim chivalry used 
to land, to go against Charlemagne. Here Orlando played 
him the tricks that got him the title of Furioso; and from the 
port of Barcelona, Angelica and Medoro took ship for her 
dominion of Cathay. I confess I looked at these shores with 
a human interest, and could not help fancying that the keel of 
our vessel was crossing a real line, over which knights and 
lovers had passed. And so they have, both real and fabulous ; 
the former not less romantic, the latter scarcely less real ; to 
thousands, indeed, much more so ; for who knows of hundreds 
of real men and women that have crossed these waters, and 
suffered actual passion on those shores and hills ? And who 
knows not Orlando and all the hard blows he gave, and the 
harder blow than all given him by two happy lovers ; and the 
lovers themselves, the representatives of all the young love 
that ever was. I had a grudge of my own against Angelica, 
looking upon myself as jilted by those fine eyes which the 
painter has given her in the English picture; for I took her 
for a more sentimental person; but I excused her, seeing her 
beset and tormented by all those knights, who thought they 
earned a right to her by hacking and hewing ; and I more 
than pardoned her, when I found that Medoro, besides being 
young and handsome, was a friend and a devoted follower. 
But what of that ? They were both young and handsome ; 



VOYAGE TO ITALY. 275 

and love, at that time of life, goes upon no other merits, 
taking all the rest upon trust in the generosity of its wealth 
and as willing to bestow a throne as a ribbon, to show the ali- 
sufficiency of its contentment. Fair speed your sails over the 
lucid waters, ye lovers, on a lover-like sea ! Fair speed 
them, yet never land ; for where the poet has left you, there 
ought ye, as ye are, to be living for ever — for ever gliding 
about a summer-sea, touching at its flowery islands, and 
reposing beneath its moon. 

9th. Completely fair wind at south-west. Saw Montserrat. 
The sunshine, reflected on the water from the lee studding- 
sail, was like shot silk. At half-past seven in the evening, 
night was risen in the east, while the sun was setting opposite. 
11 Black night has come up already," said our poetical captain. 
A fair breeze all night and all next day, took us on at the rate 
of about five miles an hour, very refreshing after the calms 
and foul winds. We passed the Gulf of Lyons still more 
pleasantly than we did the Bay of Biscay, for in the latter 
there was a calm. In both of these places a little rough 
handling is generally looked for. 

13th. The Alps ! It was the first time I had seen moun- 
tains. They had a fine sulky look, up aloft in the sky, — cold, 
lofty, and distant. I used to think that mountains would 
impress me but little ; that by the same process of imagina- 
tion reversed, by which a brook can be fancied a mighty 
river, with forests instead of verdure on its banks, a mountain 
could be made a molehill, over which we step. But one look 
convinced me to the contrary. I found I could elevate better 
than I could pull down; and I was glad of it. It was not 
that the sight of the Alps was necessary to convince me of 
11 the being of a God," as it is said to have done somebody, or 
to put me upon any reflections respecting infinity and first 
causes, of which I have had enough in my time ; but I 
seemed to meet for the first time a grand poetical thought in 
a material shape, — to see a piece of one's book-wonders 
realized, — something very earthly, yet standing between earth 
and heaven, like a piece of the antediluvian world looking out 
of the coldness of ages. I remember reading in a Review a 
passage from some book of travels, which spoke of the author 
standing on the sea-shore, and being led by the silence and 
the abstraction, and the novel grandeur of the objects around 
him, to think of the earth, not in its geographical relations, 
but as a planet in connection with other planets, and rolling 

18—2 



276 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

in the immensity of space. With these thoughts I have been 
familiar, as I suppose every one has been who knows what 
solitude is, and has an imagination, and perhaps not the best 
health. But we grow used to the mightiest aspects of 
thought, as we do to the immortal visages of the moon and 
stars : and therefore the first sight of the Alps, though much 
less things than any of these, and a toy, as I had fancied, for 
imagination to recreate itself with after their company, startles 
us like the disproof of a doubt, or the verification of an early 
dream, — a ghost, as it were, made visible by daylight, and 
giving us an enormous sense of its presence and mate- 
riality. 

In the course of the day, we saw the table-land about 
Monaco. It brought to my mind the ludicrous distress of the 
petty prince of that place, when on his return from inter- 
changing congratulations with his new masters and the legiti- 
mates, he suddenly met his old master, Napoleon, on his 
return from Elba. Or did he meet him when going to Elba ? 
I forget which ; but the distresses and confusion of the prince 
were at all events as certain as the superiority and amusement 
of the great man. In either case, this was the natural division 
of things, and the circumstances would have been the same. 
A large grampus went by, heaping the water into clouds of 
foam. Another time, we saw a shark with his fin above 
water. The Alps were now fully and closely seen, and a 
glorious sunset took place. There was the greatest grandeur 
and the loveliest beauty. Among others was a small string 
of clouds, like rubies with facets, a very dark tinge being put 
here and there, as if by a painter, to set off the rest. Bed is 
certainly the colour of beauty, and ruby the most beautiful of 
reds. It was in no commonplace spirit that Marlowe, in his 
list of precious stones, called them " beauteous rubies," but 
with exquisite gusto : 

f( Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, 
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, 
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds," &c. 

They come upon you, among the rest, like the women of gems. 
All these colours we had about us in our Mediterranean sun- 
sets ; and as if fortune would add to them by a freak of fancy, 
a little shoal of fish, sparkling as silver, leaped out of the 
water this afternoon, like a sprinkle of shillings. They were 
the anchovies, or Sardinias that we eat. They give a burlesque 



VOYAGE TO ITALY. 277 

title to the sovereign of these seas, whom the Tuscans call 
"King of the Sardinias."* 

We were now sailing up the angle of the Gulf of Genoa, 
its shore looking as Italian as possible, with groves and white 
villages. The names, too, were alluring, — One&lia, Albenga, 
Savona; the last, the birthplace of a sprightly poet (Frugoni), 
whose works I was acquainted with. The breeze was the strong- 
est we had had yet, and not quite fair, but we made good 
head against it; the queen-like city of Genoa, crowned with 
white palaces, sat at the end of the gulf, as if to receive us in 
state ; and at two o'clock, the waters being as blue as the sky, 
and all hearts rejoicing, we entered our Italian harbour, and 
heard Italian words. 

Luckily for us, these first words were Tuscan. A pilot boat 
came out. Somebody asked a question which we did not hear, 
and the captain replied to it. " Va bene," said the pilot, in a 
fine open voice, and turned the head of the boat with a tranquil 
dignity. " Va bene," thought I, indeed. "All goes well" 
truly. The words are delicious, and the omen good. My family 
have arrived so far in safety ; we have but a little more voyage 
to make, a few steps to measure back in this calm Mediterra- 
nean ; the weather is glorious ; Italy looks like what we ex- 
pected; in a day or two we shall hear of our friends: health 
and peace are before us, pleasure to others and profit to our- 
selves ; and it is hard if we do not enjoy again, before long, 
the society of all our friends, both abroad and at home. In a 
day or two we received a letter from Shelley, saying that 
winds and waves, he hoped, would never part us more.— 
Alas! for that saying. 

On the 28th of June, we set sail for Leghorn. The weather 
was still as fine as possible, and our concluding trip as agree- 
able ; with the exception of a storm of thunder and lightning 
one night, which was the completest I ever saw. Our news- 
paper friend, "the oldest man living," ought to have been 
there to see it. The lightning fell in all parts of the sea, like 
pillars ; or like great melted fires, suddenly dropped from a 
giant torch. Now it pierced the sea like rods ; now fell like 
enormous flakes or tongues, suddenly swallowed up. At one 
time, it seemed to confine itself to a dark corner of the ocean, 
making formidable shows of gigantic and flashing lances (for 
it was the most perpendicular lightning I ever saw) : then it 

* Not, however, I suppose, the King now reigning ; who ha* given 
despots other fish to fry. 



278 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

dashed broadly at the whole sea, as if it would sweep us away 
in flame; and then came in random portions about the vessel, 
treading the waves hither and thither, like the legs of fiery 
spirits descending in wrath. 

I now had a specimen (and confess I was not sorry to see 
it) of the fear which could enter even into the hearts of our 
"gallant herroes" when thrown into an unusual situation. 
The captain, almost the only man unmoved, or apparently so 
(and I really believe he was as fearless on all occasions, as his 
native valour, to say nothing of his brandy and water, could 
make him), was so exasperated with the alarm depicted in the 
faces of some of his crew, that he contemptuously knocked 
down the poor fellow at the helm ("his brother, an apprentice 
seaman] and cried, " You are afraid, sir!" For our parts, 
having no fear of thunder and lightning, and not being fully 
aware perhaps of the danger to which vessels are exposed on 
these occasions, particularly if, like our Channel friend, they 
carry gunpowder (as most of them do, more or less), we were 
quite at our ease compared with our inexperienced friends 
about us, who had never witnessed anything of the like before, 
even in books. Besides, we thought it impossible for the 
Mediterranean to play us any serious trick, — that sunny and 
lucid basin, which we had beheld only in its contrast with a 
northern and a winter sea. Little did we think, that in so 
short a space of time, and somewhere about this very spot, a 
catastrophe would take place, that should put an end to all 
sweet thoughts, both of the Mediterranean and of the south. 



CHAPTEE XVIII. 



RETUEN TO FIEST ACQUAINTANCE WITH LOED BYEON AND 
THOMAS MOOEE. 

Lord Byron was at Leghorn ; the bad weather has disap- 
peared ; the vessel is about to enter port ; and as everything 
concerning the noble lord is interesting, and the like may be 
said of his brother wit and poet, Thomas Moore, who intro- 
duced me to him, I will take this opportunity of doing what 
had better, perhaps, have been done when I first made his lord- 
ship's acquaintance; namely, state when it was that I first saw 
the one, and how I became acquainted with the other. My inti- 
macy with Lord Byron is about to become closer ; the results 



RETURN TO ACQUAINTANCE WITH BYRON AND MOORE. 279 

of it are connected both with him and his friend, and as these 
results are on the eve of commencing, my own interest in the 
subject is strengthened, and I call things to mind which I had 
suffered to escape me. 

The first time I saw Lord Byron, he was rehearsing the part 
of Leander, under the auspices of Mr. Jackson, the prize- 
fighter. It was in the river Thames, before his first visit to 
Greece. There used to be a bathing-machine stationed on the 
eastern side of Westminster Bridge ; and I had been bathing, 
and was standing on this machine adjusting my clothes, when 
I noticed a respectable-looking manly person, who was eyeing 
something at a distance. This was Mr. Jackson waiting for 
his pupil. The latter was swimming with somebody for a 
wager. I forgot what his tutor said of him ; but he spoke in 
terms of praise. I saw nothing in Lord Byron at that time, 
but a young man who, like myself, had written a bad volume 
of poems; and though I had a sympathy with him on this 
account, and more respect for his rank than I was willing to 
suppose, my sympathy was not an agreeable one ; so, content- 
ing myself with seeing his lordship's head bob up and down in 
the water, like a buoy, I came away. 

Lord Byron, when he afterwards came to see me in prison, 
was pleased to regret that I had not stayed. He told me, 
that the sight of my volume at Harrow had been one of his 
incentives to write verses, and that he had had the same 
passion for friendship which I had displayed in it. To my 
astonishment he quoted some of the lines, and would not hear 
me speak ill of them. His harbinger in the visit was Moore. 
Moore told me, that, besides liking my politics, his lordship 
liked the Feast of the Poets, and would be glad to make my 
acquaintance. I said I felt myself highly flattered, and 
should be proud to entertain his lordship as well as a poor 
patriot could. He was accordingly invited to dinner. His 
friend only stipulated that there should be " fish and veget- 
ables for the noble bard;" his lordship at that time being 
anti-carnivorous in his eating. He came, and we passed a 
very pleasant afternoon, talking of books, and school, and of 
their friend and brother poet the late Rev. %[r. Bowles, whose 
sonnets were among the early inspirations of Coleridge. 

Lord Byron, as the reader has seen, subsequently called on 
me in the prison several times. He used to bring books for 
the Story of Rimini, which I was then writing. He would 
not let the footman bring them in. He would enter with a 



280 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

couple of quartos under his arm ; and give you to understand 
that he was prouder of being a friend and a man of letters, 
than a lord. It was thus that by flattering one's vanity he 
persuaded us of his own freedom from it; for he could see 
very well, that I had more value for lords than I supposed. 

The noble poet was a warm politician, earnest in the cause 
of liberty. His failure in the House of Lords is well known. 
He was very candid about it ; said he was much frightened, 
and should never be able to do anything that way. Lords of 
all parties came about him, and consoled him. He particu- 
larly mentioned Lord Sidmouth, as being unexpectedly kind. 

It was very pleasant to see Lord Byron and Moore toge- 
ther. They harmonized admirably : though their knowledge 
of one another began in talking of a duel, in consequence of 
his lordship attacking the licence of certain early verses. 
Moore's acquaintance with myself (as far as concerned corre- 
spondence by letter) originated in the mention of him in the 
Feast of the Poets. He subsequently wrote an opera called the 
Blue Stocking, respecting which he sent me a letter, at once 
deprecating, and warranting, objection to it. I was then 
editor of the Examiner: I did object to it, though with all 
acknowledgment of his genius. He came to see me, saying 
I was very much in the right; and an intercourse took place 
which was never ostensibly interrupted till I thought myself 
aggrieved by his opposition to the periodical work proposed 
to me by his noble friend. I say " thought myself aggrieved," 
because I have long since acquitted him of any intention 
towards me, more hostile than that of zeal in behalf of what 
he supposed best for his lordship. He was desirous of pre- 
venting his friend from coming before the Tory critics under 
a new and irritating aspect, at a time when it might be 
considered prudent to keep quiet, and propitiate objections 
already existing. The only thing which remained for me to 
complain of, was his not telling me so frankly ; for this would 
have been a confidence which I deserved ; and it would either 
have made me, of my own accord, object to the project at 
once, without the least hesitation, or, at all events, have been 
met by me with such a hearty sense of the objector's plain 
dealing, and in so friendly a spirit of difference, that no ill- 
will, I think, could have remained on either side. Moore, at 
least, was of too generous a spirit for it; and I was of too 
grateful a one. 

Unfortunately, this plan was not adopted by his lordship's 



RETUKN TO ACQUAINTANCE WITH BYRON AND MOOBE. 281 

friends ; and hence a series of bitter feelings on both sides, 
which, as I was the first to express them, so I did not hesitate 
to be the first to regret publicly, when on both sides they 
had tacitly been done away. 

Moore fancied, among other things, that I meant to pain 
him by speaking of his small stature ; and perhaps it was 
wrong to hazard, a remark on so delicate a subject, however 
inoffensively meant; especially as it led to other personal 
characteristics, which might have seemed of less doubtful 
intention. But I felt only a painter's pleasure in taking the 
portrait ; and I flattered myself that, as far as externals went, 
I abundantly evinced my good-will, not only by doing justice 
to all that was handsome and poetical in his aspect, and 
by noticing the beauty reported of his childhood, but by 
the things which I said of the greatness observable in so 
many little men in history, especially as recorded by Claren- 
don. In fact, this had been such a favourite subject with 
me, that some journalists concluded I must be short myself ; 
which is not the case. Men of great action, I suspect, in- 
cluding the most heroical soldiers, have been for the most 
part of short stature, from the fabulous Tydeus, to Alexander 
and Agesilaus, and so downwards to Wellington and Napo- 
leon. Nor have sages and poets, or any kind of genius, been 
wanting to the list ; from the ancient philosopher who was i 
obliged to carry lead in his pockets lest he should be blown 
away, down to Michael Angelo, and Montaigne, and Barrow, 
and Spenser himself, and the Falklands and Haleses of Cla- 
rendon, and Pope, and Steele, and Eeynolds, and Mozart. 

Moore's forehead was bony and full of character, with 
u bumps " of wit, large and radiant enough to transport a 
phrenologist ; Sterne had such another. His eyes were as 
dark and fine as you would wish to see under a set of vine- 
leaves; his mouth generous and good-humoured, with dim- 
ples ; and his manner as bright as his talk, full of the wish 
to please and be pleased. He sang, and played with great i 
taste on the pianoforte, as might be supposed from his musical 
compositions. His voice, which was a little hoarse in speak- 
ing (at least I used to think so), softened into a breath, like 
that of the flute, when singing. In speaking, he was em- 
phatic in rolling the letter r, perhaps out of a despair of being 
able to get rid of the national peculiarity. The structure of 
his versification, when I knew him, was more artificial than 
it was afterwards; and in his serious compositions it suited 



282 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

him better. He had hardly faith enough in the sentiments 
of which he treated to give way to his impulses in writing, 
except when they were festive and witty; and artificial 
thoughts demand a similar embodiment. Both patriotism 
and personal experience, however, occasionally inspired him 
with lyric pathos; and in his naturally musical perception of 
the right principles of versification, he contemplated the fine, 
easy-playing, muscular style of Dry den, with a sort of peril- 
ous pleasure. I remember his quoting with delight a couplet 
of Dryden's, which came with a particular grace from his lips : — 

* f Let honour and preferment go for gold ; 
But glorious beauty isn't to be sold." 

Beside the pleasure I took in Moore's society as a man of 
wit, I had a great esteem for him as a man of candour and 
independence. His letters were full of all that was pleasant 
in him. As I was a critic at that time, and in the habit of 
giving my opinion of his works in the Examiner, he would 
write me his opinion of the opinion, with a mixture of good 
humour, admission, and deprecation, so truly delightful, and 
a sincerity of criticism on my own writings so extraordinary 
for so courteous a man, though with abundance of balm and 
eulogy, that never any subtlety of compliment could surpass 
it; and with all my self-confidence I never ceased to think 
that the honour was on my side, and that I could only deserve 
such candour of intercourse by being as ingenuous as himself. 
This admiring regard for him he completed by his behaviour 
to an old patron of his, who, not thinking it politic to retain 
him openly by his side, proposed to facilitate his acceptance 
of a place under the Tories; an accommodation which Moore 
rejected as an indignity. I thought, afterwards, that a man 
of such a spirit should not have condescended to attack Eous- 
seau and poor foolish Madame de Warens, out of a desire to 
right himself with polite life, and with the memory of some 
thoughtless productions of his own. Polite life was only too 
happy to possess him in his graver days ; and the thoughtless 
productions, however to be regretted on reflection, were 
reconcileable to reflection itself on the same grounds on which 
Nature herself and all her exuberance is to be reconciled. 
At least, without presuming to judge nature in the abstract, 
an ultra-sensitive and enjoying poet is himself a production of 
nature ; and we may rest assured, that she will no more judge 
him with harshness ultimately, than she will condemn the 
excess of her own vines and fig-trees. 



283 
CHAPTER XIX. 

LORD BYRON IN ITALY — SHELLEY — PISA. 

As I am now about to re-enter into the history of my connec- 
tion with Lord Byron, I will state in what spirit I mean to do it. 
It is related of an Italian poet (Alamanni), that having in 
his younger days bitterly satirized the house of Austria, he 
found himself awkwardly situated in more advanced life, when, 
being in exile, and employed by Francis the First, the king 
sent him on an embassy to the court of Charles the Fifth. 
One of his sarcasms, in particular, had been very offensive. 
Alluding to the Austrian crest, the two-headed eagle, he had 
described the imperial house as a monstrous creature, 

Which bore two beaks, the better to devour. 
(" Che per piu divorar, due becchi porta.") 

Charles had treasured this passage in his mind ; and when the 
ambassador, perhaps forgetting it altogether, or trusting to its 
being forgotten, had terminated a fine oration, full of compli- 
ments to the power which he had so angrily painted, the Em- 
peror, without making any other observation, calmly said — 

" Which bore two beaks, the better to devour." 
u Sir," said Alamanni, not hesitating, or betraying any con- 
fusion (which shows that he was either prepared for the 
rebuke, or was a man of great presence of mind), " when I 
wrote that passage I spoke as a poet, to whom it is permitted 
to use fictions ; but now I speak as an ambassador, who is 
bound to utter truth. I spoke then as a young man ; but I 
now speak as a man advanced in years. I spoke as one who 
was agitated by grief and passion at the wretched condition 
of my country ; but now I am calm, and free from passion.'* 
Charles rose from his seat, and laying his hand on the shoulder 
of the ambassador, said, in the kindest manner, that the loss 
of his country ought not to grieve him, since he had found 
such a patron in Francis; and that to an honest man every 
place was his country. 

I would apply this anecdote to some things which I have 
formerly said of Lord Byron. I do not mean that I ever 
wrote any fictions about him. I wrote nothing which I did 
not feel to be true, or think so. But I can say with Alamanni, 
that I was then a young man, and that I am now advanced in 
years. I can say, that I was agitated by grief and anger, 



284 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

and that I am now free from anger. I can say, that I was 
far more alive to other people's defects than to my own, and 
that I am now sufficiently sensible of my own to show to others 
the charity which I need myself. I can say, moreover, that 
apart from a little allowance for provocation, I do not think 
it right to exhibit what is amiss, or may be thought amiss, 
in the character of a fellow-creature, out of any feeling but 
unmistakeable sorrow, or the wish to lessen evils which 
society itself may have caused. 

Lord Byron, with respect to the points on which he erred 
and suffered (for on all others, a man like himself, poet and 
wit, could not but give and receive pleasure), was the victim 
of a bad bringing up, of a series of false positions in society, 
of evils arising from the mistakes of society itself, of a personal 
disadvantage (which his feelings exaggerated), nay, of his 
very advantages of person, and of a face so handsome as to 
render him an object of admiration. Even the lameness, of 
which he had such a resentment, only softened the admiration 
with tenderness. 

But he did not begin life under good influences. He had 
a mother, herself, in all probability, the victim of bad train- 
ing, who would fling the dishes from table at his head, and 
tell him he would be a scoundrel like his father. His father, 
who was cousin to the previous lord, had been what is called 
a man upon town, and was neither rich nor very respectable. 
The young lord, whose means had not yet recovered them- 
selves, went to school, noble but poor, expecting to be in the 
ascendant with his title, yet kept down by the inconsistency 
of his condition. He left school to put on the cap with the 
gold tuft, which is worshipped at college: — he left college to 
fall into some of the worst hands on the town: — his first pro- 
ductions were contemptuously criticized, and his genius was 
thus provoked into satire : — his next were over-praised, which 
increased his self-love: — he married when his temper had 
been soured by difficulties, and his will and pleasure pampered 
by the sex : — and he went companionless into a foreign country, 
where all this perplexity could repose without being taught 
better, and where the sense of a lost popularity could be 
drowned in licence. 

Should we not wonder that he retained so much of the 
grand and beautiful in his writings? — that the indestruc- 
tible tendency of the poetical to the good should have struggled 
to so much purpose through faults and inconsistencies? — j 



LORD BYRON IN ITALY— SHELLEY— PISA. 285 

rather than quarrel with his would-be misanthropy and his 
effeminate wailings? The worst things which he did were 
to gird resentfully at women, and to condescend to some 
other pettiness of conduct which he persuaded himself were 
self-defences on his own part, and merited by his fellow- 
creatures. But he was never incapable of generosity : he 
was susceptible of the tenderest emotions ; and though I doubt, 
from a certain proud and stormy look about the upper part 
of his face, whether his command of temper could ever have 
been quite relied on, yet I cannot help thinking, that had he 
been properly brought up, there would have been nobody 
capable of more lasting and loving attachments. The lower 
part of the face was a model of beauty. 

I am sorry I ever wrote a syllable respecting Lord Byron 
which might have been spared. I have still to relate my con- 
nection with him, but it will be related in a different manner. 
Pride, it is said, will have a fall: and I must own, that on 
this subject I have experienced the truth of the saying. I 
had prided myself — I should pride myself now if I had not 
been thus rebuked — on not being one of those who talk against 
others. I went counter to this feeling in a book; and to 
crown the absurdity of the contradiction, I was foolish enough 
to suppose that the very fact of my so doing would show that 
I had done it in no other instance ! that having been thus 
public in the error, credit would be given me for never having 
been privately so ! Such are the delusions inflicted on us by 
self-love. When the consequence was represented to me as 
characterized by my enemies, I felt, enemies though they 
were, as if I blushed from head to foot. It is true I had been 
goaded to the task by misrepresentations: — I had resisted 
every other species of temptation to do it: — and, after all, I 
said more in his excuse, and less to his disadvantage, than 
many of those who reproved me. But enough. I owed the 
acknowledgment to him and to myself; and I shall proceed 
on my course with a sigh for both, and I trust in the good- 
will of the sincere. 

To return, then, to my arrival at Leghorn. 

In the harbour of Leghorn I found Mr. Trelawny, of the 
old Cornish family of that name, since known as the author 
of the Younger Brother. He was standing with his knight- 
errant aspect, dark, handsome, and mustachioed, in Lord 
Byron's boat, the Bolivar, of which he had taken charge for 
his lordship. In a day or two I went to see my noble ac- 



286 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

quaintance, who was in what the Italians call villeggiatura at 
Monte Nero; that is to say, enjoying a country house for the 
season. I there became witness to a singular adventure, 
which seemed to make me free of Italy and stilettos before 
I had well set foot in the country. 

The day was very hot ; the road to Monte Nero was very 
hot, through dusty suburbs ; and when I got there, I found 
the hottest looking house I ever saw. It was salmon colour. 
Think of this, flaring over the country in a hot Italian sun ! 

But the greatest of all the heats was within. Upon seeing 
Lord Byron, I hardly knew him, he was grown so fat; and he 
was longer in recognising me, I had grown so thin. He took 
me into an inner room, and introduced me to Madame Guic- 
cioli, then very young as well as handsome, who was in a state 
of great agitation. Her face was flushed, her eyes lit up, and 
her hair (which she wore hanging loose), streaming as if in 
disorder. The Conte Pietro, her brother, came in presently, 
also in a state of agitation, and having his arm in a sling. I 
then learned that a quarrel having taken place among the 
servants, the young Count had interfered, and been stabbed. 
He was very angry ; Madame Guiccioli was more so, and could 
not admit the charitable comments of Lord Byron, who was 
for making light of the matter. They seemed to think the 
honour of their nation at stake. Indeed, there was a look in 
the business not a little formidable ; for though the stab was 
not much, the inflictor of it threatened more, and was at that 
minute keeping watch outside, with the avowed intention of 
assaulting the first person that issued forth. I looked out of 
the window, and met his eye glaring upwards like a tiger. He 
had a red cap on like a sansculotte, and a most sinister aspect, 
dreary and meagre — that of a proper caitiff. 

How long things had continued in this state I cannot say ; 
but the hour was come when Lord Byron and his friend took 
their evening drive, and the thing was to be put an end to 
somehow. A servant had been despatched for the police, and 
was not returned. 

At length we set out, the lady earnestly entreating his lord- 
ship to keep back, and all of us uniting to keep in advance of 
Conte Pietro, who was exasperated. 

It was a curious moment for a stranger from England. I 
fancied myself pitched into one of the scenes in the Mysteries 
of UdolpJio. Everything was new, foreign, and vehement 
There was the lady, flushed and dishevelled, exclaiming against 



LORD BYRON IN ITALY— SHELLEY— PISA. 287 

he " scelerato ;" the young Count, wounded and threatening; 
md the assassin waiting for us with his knife. Nobody, how- 
ever, could have put a better face on the matter than Lord 
3yron did, — composed, and endeavouring to compose: and as 
:o myself, I was so occupied with the whole scene, that I had 
lot time to be frightened. Forth we issue at the house door, 
ill squeezing to have the honour of being first, when a termi- 
ration is put to the tragedy by the man's throwing himself on 
i bench, extending his arms, and bursting into tears. His cap 
was half over his eyes ; his face gaunt, ugly, and unshaved ; 
bis appearance altogether more squalid and miserable than 
xn Englishman would conceive it possible to find in such an 
Bstablishment. This blessed figure reclined weeping and wail- 
ing, and asking pardon for his offence ; and to crown all, he 
requested Lord Byron to kiss him. 

The noble lord conceived such an excess of charity super- 
fluous. He pardoned him, but said he must not think of 
remaining in his service ; upon which the man renewed his 
weeping and wailing, and continued kissing his hand. I 
was then struck with the footing on which the gentry and 
their servants stand with each other in Italy, and the good- 
nature with which the strongest exhibitions of anger can be 
followed up. Conte Pietro, who was full of good qualities (for 
though he was here with his sister's lover, we must not judge 
of Italian customs by English), accepted the man's hand, and 
even shook it heartily; and Madame Guiccioli, though unable 
to subside so quickly from her state of indignant exaltation, 
looked in relenting sort, and speedily accorded him her grace 
also, seeing my lord had forgiven him. The man was all 
penitence and wailing, but he was obliged to quit. The police 
would have forced him, if he had not been dismissed. He left 
the country, and called in his way on Shelley, who was shocked 
at his appearance, and gave him some money out of his very 
antipathy ; for he thought nobody would help such an ill-look- 
ing fellow, if he did not. 

The unpleasant part of the business did not end here. It 
was, remotely, one of the causes of Lord Byron's leaving Italy ; 
for it increased the awkwardness of his position with the 
Tuscan government, and gave a further unsteadiness to his 
proceedings. His friends, the Gambas, were already only 
upon sufferance in Tuscany. They had been obliged to quit 
their native country Eomagna, on account of their connection 
with the Carbonari; and Lord Byron, who had identified him- 



288 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

self with their fortunes, became a party to their wanderings, 
and to the footing on which they stood wherever they were 
permitted to abide. The Grand Duke's government had given 
him to understand that they were at liberty to reside in Tus- 
cany, provided they were discreet. A. fracas which happened 
in the streets of Pisa, a little before I came, had given a shock 
to the tranquillity of this good understanding; the retinue of 
the Gambas having been the foremost persons concerned in it : 
and now, another of their men having caused a disturbance, 
the dilemma was completed. Lord Byron's residence in Tus- 
cany was made uneasy to him. It was desired that he should 
separate himself from the Gambas : and though it was under- 
stood that a little courtesy on his part towards the Grand 
Duke and Duchess, the latter of whom was said to be par- 
ticularly desirous of seeing him at court, would have produced 
a carte-blanche for all parties, yet he chose to take neither of 
those steps ; he therefore returned to his house at Pisa, only 
to reside there two or three months longer ; after which he 
quitted the grand-ducal territory, and departed for Genoa. 

From Monte Nero I returned to Leghorn ; and, taking leave 
of our vessel, we put up at an hotel. Mr. Shelley then came 
to us from his villeggiatura at Lerici. His town abode, as 
well as Lord Byron's, was at Pisa. I will not dwell upon the 
moment. 

Leghorn is a polite Wapping, with a square and a theatre. 
The country around is uninteresting when you become ac-* 
quainted with it; but to a stranger the realization of anything 
he has read about is a delight, especially of such things as 
vines hanging from trees, and the sight of Apennines. It is 
pleasant, too, to a lover of books, when at Leghorn, to think 
that Smollett once lived there ; not, indeed, happily, for he 
was very ill, and besides living there, died there. But genius 
gives so much pleasure (and must also have received so much 
in the course of its life) that the memory of its troubles is 
overcome by its renown. Smollett once lived, as Lord Byron 
did, at Monte Nero ; and he was buried in the Leghorn 
cemetery. 

Mr. Shelley accompanied us from Leghorn to Pisa, in order 
to see us fixed in our new abode. Lord Byron left Monte 
Nero at the same time, and joined us. We occupied the 
ground-floor of his lordship's house, the Casa Lanfranchi, on 
the river Arno, which runs through the city. Divided tenan- 
cies of this kind are common in Italy, where few houses are 



LOPJ) BYRON IN ITALY— SHELLEY — PISA. 289 

in possession of one family. The families in this instance, as 
in others, remained distinct. The ladies at the respective 
heads of them never exchanged even a word. It was set to the 
account of their want of acquaintance with their respective 
languages; and the arrangement, I believe, which in every 
respect thus tacitly took place, was really, for many reasonable 
considerations, objected to by nobody. 

The Casa Lanrranchi, which had been the mansion of the 
great Pisan family whose ancestors figure in Dante, is said to 
have been built by Michael Angelo, and is worthy of him. It 
is in a bold and broad style throughout, with those harmo- 
nious graces of proportion which are sure to be found in an 
Italian mansion. The outside is of rough marble. 

We had not been in the house above an hour or two, when 
my friend brought the celebrated surgeon, Vacca, to see Mrs. 
Hunt. He had a pleasing, intelligent face, and was the most 
gentlemanlike Italian I ever saw. Vacca pronounced his 
patient to be in a decline ; and little hope was given us by 
others that she would survive beyond the year. She lived 
till the year 1857, and Vacca had been dead many years 
before. I do not say this to his disparagement, for he was 
very skilful, and deserved his celebrity. But it appears to me, 
from more than one remarkable instance, that there is a super- 
stition about what are called declines and consumptions, from 
which the most eminent of the profession are not free. I 
suspect, indeed I may say I know, that many people of this 
tendency, or at least supposed to be of it, may reach, with a 
proper mode of living, to as good a period of existence as 
most others. The great secret in this as in all other cases, 
and, indeed, in almost all moral as well as physical cases of ill, 
seems to be in diet and regimen. If some demi-god could 
regulate for mankind what they should eat and drink, and by 
what bodily treatment circulate their blood, he would put an 
end to half the trouble which the world undergo, some of the 
most romantic sorrows with which they flatter themselves not 
excepted. The case, however, in the present instance was 
perhaps peculiar, and may not before have been witnessed by 
Vacca. The expectoration, at all events, of blood itself, and 
this too sometimes in alarming quantities, and never entirely 
without recurrence, lasted throughout a life of no ordinary 
duration. 

The next day, while in the drawing-room with Lord Byron, 
I had a curious specimen of Italian manners. It was like a 

19 



290 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

scene in an opera. One of his servants, a young man, sud- 
denly came in smiling, and was followed by his sister, i 
handsome brunette, in a bodice and sleeves, and her hail 
uncovered. She advanced to his lordship to welcome hin: 
back to Pisa, and present him with a basket of flowers. Ir 
doing this, she took his hand and kissed it ; then turned tc 
the stranger, and kissed his hand also. I thought we oughl 
to have struck up a quartett. 

It is the custom of Italy, as it used to be in England, foi 
inferiors to kiss your hand in coming and going. There is an 
air of good-will in it that is very agreeable, though the im- 
plied sense of inferiority is hardly so pleasant. Servants have 
a custom also of wishing you a "happy evening" (felice sera] 
when they bring in lights. To this you may respond in like 
manner ; after which it seems impossible for the sun to " gc 
down on the wrath," if there is any, of either party. 

In a day or two Shelley took leave of us to return tc 
Lerici for the rest of the season, meaning, however, to see us 
more than once in the interval. I spent one delightful after- 
noon with him, wandering about Pisa, and visiting the 
cathedral. On the night of the same day he took a post- 
chaise for Leghorn, intending next morning to depart with his 
friend Captain Williams for Lerici. I entreated him, if the 
weather were violent, not to give way to his daring spirit and 
venture to sea. He promised me he would not ; and it seems 
that he did set off later than he otherwise would have done, 
apparently at a more favourable moment.* I never beheld 
him more. 

The same night there was a tremendous storm of thundei 
and lightning, which made us very anxious ; but we hoped 
our friend had arrived before then. When, some days later. 
Trelawny came to Pisa, and told us he was missing, I under- 
went one of the sensations which we read of in books, but 
seldom experience: I was tongue-tied with horror. 

A dreadful interval took place of more than a week, during 
which, every inquiry and every fond hope were exhausted. At 
the end of that period our worst fears were confirmed. A 
body had been washed on shore, near the town of Via Eeggio 
which, by the dress and stature, was known to be our friend's. 
Keats's last volume also (the Lamia, &c), was found open in 

* [This is a mistake. Shelley set off earlier than he intended, his 
departure being hastened by a desponding note which he received 
from his wife.] 






LORD BYRON IN ITALY— SHELLEY— PISA. 291 

the jacket pocket. He had probably been reading it when 
surprised by the storm. It was my copy. I had told him to 
keep it till he gave it me with his own hands. So I would 
not have it from any other. It was burnt with his remains. 
The body of his friend Mr. Williams was found near a tower, 
four miles distant from its companion. That of the third 
party in the boat, Charles Vivian, the seaman, was not dis- 
covered till nearly three weeks afterwards.* 

The remains of Shelley and Mr. Williams were burnt after 
the good ancient fashion, and gathered into coffers [those of 
Williams on the 15th of August, of Shelley on the 16th]. 
Those of Mr. Williams were subsequently taken to England. 
Shelley's were interred at Eome, in the Protestant burial- 
ground, the place which he had so touchingly described in 
recording its reception of Keats. The ceremony of the burn- 
ing was alike beautiful and distressing. Trelawny, who had 
been the chief person concerned in ascertaining the fate of his 
friends, completed his kindness by taking the most active part 
on this last mournful occasion. He and his friend Captain 
Shenley were first upon the ground, attended by proper 
assistants. Lord Byron and myself arrived shortly after- 
wards. His lordship got out of his carriage, but wandered 
away from the spectacle, and did not see it. I remained 
inside the carriage, now looking on, now drawing back with 
feelings that were not to be witnessed. 

None of the mourners, however, refused themselves the 
little comfort of supposing, that lovers of books and antiquity, 
like Shelley and his companion, Shelley in particular with his 
Greek enthusiasm., would not have been sorry to foresee this 
part of their fate. The mortal part of him, too, was saved 
from corruption ; not the least extraordinary part of his history. 
Among the materials for burning, as many of the gracefuller 
and more classical articles as could be procured — frankin- 

* [A story was current in Leghorn which conjecturally helped to 
explain the shipwreck of Shelley's boat. It went out to sea in rough 
weather, and yet was followed by a native boat. When Shelley's 
yacht was raised, a large hole was found stove in the stern. Shelley 
had on board a sum of money in dollars ; and the supposition is, that 
the men in the other boat had tried to board Shelley's piratically, but 
had desisted because the collision caused the English boat to sink ; 
and they abandoned it because the men saved would have become 
their accusers. The only facts in support of this conjectural story 
are the alleged following of the native boat, and the damage to the 
stern of Shelley's boat, otherwise not very accountable.] 

19—2 



292 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

cense, wine, &c. — were not forgotten ; and to these Keats's 
volume was added. The beauty of the flame arising from the 
funeral pile was extraordinary. The weather was beautifully 
fine. The Mediterranean, now soft and lucid, kissed the 
shore as if to make peace with it. The yellow sand and blue 
sky -were intensely contrasted with one another : marble 
mountains touched the air with coolness ; and the flame of 
the fire bore away towards heaven in vigorous amplitude, 
waving and quivering with a brightness of inconceivable 
beauty. It seemed as though it contained the glassy essence 
of vitality. You might have expected a seraphic countenance 
to look out of it, turning once more before it departed, to 
thank the friends that had done their duty. 

Yet, see how extremes can appear to meet even on occasions 
the most overwhelming; nay, even by reason of them; for as 
cold can perform the effect of fire, and burn us, so can despair 
put on the monstrous aspect of mirth. On returning from 
one of our visits to this sea-shore, we dined and drank; I 
mean, Lord Byron and myself; — dined little, and drank too 
much. Lord Byron had not shone that day, even in his cups, 
which usually brought out his best qualities. As to myself, I 
had bordered upon emotions which I have never suffered my- 
self to indulge, and which, foolishly as well as impatiently, 
render calamity, as somebody termed it, " an affront, and not 
a misfortune." The barouche drove rapidly through the 
forest of Pisa. We sang, we laughed, we shouted. I even 
felt a gaiety the more shocking, because it was real and a 
relief. What the coachman thought of us, God knows ; but 
he helped to make up a ghastly trio. He was a good- 
tempered fellow, and an affectionate husband and father ; yet 
he had the reputation of having offered his master to kill a 
man. I wish to have no such waking dream again. It was 
worthy of a German ballad. 

Shelley, when he died, was in his thirtieth year. His 
figure was tall and slight, and his constitution consumptive. 
He was subject to violent spasmodic pains, which would 
sometimes force him to lie on the ground till they were over ; 
but he had always a kind word to give to those about him, 
when his pangs allowed him to speak. In this organization, 
as well as in some other respects, he resembled the German 
poet, Schiller. Though well-turned, his shoulders were bent 
a little, owing to premature thought and trouble. The same 
causes had touched his hair with gray ; and though his habits 



LORD BYRON IN ITALY— SHELLEY — PISA. 293 

of temperance and exercise gave him a remarkable degree of 
strength, it is not supposed that he could have lived many 
years. He used to say that he had lived three times as long 
as the calendar gave out; which he would prove, between jest 
and earnest, by some remarks on Time, 

" That would have puzzled that stout Stagyrite." 

Like the Stagyrite's, his voice was high and weak. His eyes 
were large and animated, with a dash of wildness in them; 
his face small, but well shaped, particularly the mouth and 
chin, the turn of which was very sensitive and graceful. His 
complexion was naturally fair and delicate, with a colour in 
the cheeks. He had brown hair, which, though tinged with 
gray, surmounted his face well, being in considerable quan- 
tity, and tending to a curl. His side-face, upon the whole, 
was deficient in strength, and his features would not have 
told well in a bust; but when fronting and looking at you 
attentively his aspect had a certain seraphical character that 
would have suited a portrait of John the Baptist, or the 
angel whom Milton describes as holding a reed " tipt with 
fire." Nor would the most religious mind, had it known 
him, have objected to the comparison; for, with all his scep- 
ticism, Shelley's disposition was truly said to have been any- 
thing but irreligious. A person of much eminence for piety 
in our times has well observed, that the greatest want of reli- 
gious feeling is not to be among the greatest infidels, but ; 
among those who never think of religion except as a matter 
of course. The leading feature of Shelley's character may be 
said to have been a natural piety. He was pious towards 
nature, towards his friends, towards the whole human race, 
towards the meanest insect of the forest. He did himself an 
injustice with the public in using the popular name of the 
Supreme Being inconsiderately. He identified it solely with 
the most vulgar and tyrannical notions of a God made after 
the worst human fashion; and did not sufficiently reflect that 
it was often used by a juster devotion to express a sense of 
the great Mover of the universe. An impatience in contra- 
dicting w r orldly and pernicious notions of a supernatural 
power led his own aspirations to be misconstrued; for though, 
in the severity of his dialectics, and particularly in moments 
of despondency, he sometimes appeared to be hopeless of what 
he most desired — and though he justly thought that a Divine 
Being would prefer the increase of benevolence and good 



294 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

before any praise, or even recognition of himself (a reflection 
worth thinking of by the intolerant), yet there was in reality 
no belief to which he clung with more fondness than that of 
some great pervading " Spirit of Intellectual Beauty ;" as may 
be seen in his aspirations on that subject. He assented warmly 
to an opinion which I expressed in the cathedral at Pisa, while 
the organ was playing, that a truly divine religion might yet 
be established, if charity were really made the principle of it, 
instead of faith. 

Music affected him deeply. He had also a delicate percep- 
tion of the beauties of sculpture. It is not one of the least 
evidences of his conscientious turn of mind that, with the 
inclination and the power to surround himself in Italy with 
all the graces of life, he made no sort of attempt that way; 
finding other uses for his money, and not always satisfied 
with himself for indulging even in the luxury of a boat. 
When he bought elegancies of any kind it was to give them 
away. Boating was his great amusement. He loved the 
mixture of action and repose which he found in it ; and 
delighted to fancy himself gliding away to Utopian isles and 
bowers of enchantment. But he would give up any pleasure 
to do a deed of kindness. Indeed, he may be said to have 
made the whole comfort of his life a sacrifice to what he 
thought the wants of society. 

Temperament and early circumstances conspired to make 
him a reformer, at a time of life when few begin to think for i 
themselves; and it was his misfortune, as far as immediate 
reputation was concerned, that he was thrown upon society 
with a precipitancy and vehemence which rather startled 
others with fear for themselves, than allowed them to become 
sensible of the love and zeal that impelled him. He was like 
a spirit that had darted out of its orb, and found itself in 
another world. I used to tell him that he had come from the 
planet Mercury. When I heard of the catastrophe that over- 
took him it seemed as if this spirit, not sufficiently constituted 
like the rest of the world to obtain their sympathy, yet gifted 
with a double portion of love for all living things, had been 
found dead in a solitary corner of the earth, its wings stiff- 
ened, its w r arm heart cold ; the relics of a misunderstood 
nature, slain by the ungenial elements. 

We remained but three months at Pisa subsequently to 
this calamitous event. We then went to Genoa, where we 
received the first number of the periodical work, the Liberal, 



LORD BYRON IX ITALY — SHELLEY — PISA. 29a 

which Lord Byron had invited me to set up, and in which 
Shelley was to have assisted. He did assist; for his beautiful 
translation of the May Day Night, from Goethe, appeared in 
the first number. 

But more of this publication when I come to Genoa. I 
will first say a few words respecting the way in which we 
passed our time at Pisa, and then speak of the city itself and 
its highly interesting features, which are not so well known 
as they should be. 

Our manner of life was this. Lord Byron, who used to sit 
up at night writing Don Juan (which he did under the influ- 
ence of gin and water), rose late in the morning. He break- 
fasted; read; lounged about, singing an air, generally out of 
Eossini ; then took a bath, and was dressed ; and coming 
down stairs, was beard, still singing, in the court-yard, out of 
which the garden ascended, by a few steps, at the back of the 
house. The servants, at the same time, brought out two or 
three chairs. My study, a little room in a corner, with an 
orange-tree at the window, looked upon this court-yard. I 
was generally at my writing when he came down, and either 
acknowledged his presence by getting up and saying some- 
thing from the window, or he called out "Leontius!" (a 
name into which Shelley had pleasantly converted that of 
" Leigh Hunt") and came up to the window with some jest 
or other challenge to conversation. His dress, as at Monte 
Nero, was a nankin jacket, with white waistcoat and trousers, 
and a cap, either velvet or linen, with a shade to it. In his 
hand was a tobacco-box, from which he helped himself occa- 
sionally to what he thought a preservative from getting too 
fat. Perhaps, also, he supposed it good for the teeth. We 
then lounged about, or sat and talked, Madame Guiccioli, 
with her sleek tresses, descending after her toilet to join us. 
The garden was small and square, but plentifully stocked 
with oranges and other shrubs; and, being well watered, it 
looked very green and refreshing under the Italian sky. The 
lady generally attracted us up into it, if we had not been there 
before. Her appearance might have reminded an English 
spectator of Chaucer's heroine — 

** Yclothed was she, fresh for to devise. 
Her yellow hair was braided in a tress 
Behind her back, a yarde long, I guess: 
And in the garden (as the sun uprist) 
She walketh up and down, where as her list :" 



296 ATJTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

and then, as Dryden has it: — 

" At every turn she made a little stand, 
And thrust among the thorns her lily hand." 

Madame Guiccioli, who was at that time about twenty, was 
handsome and lady-like, with an agreeable manner, and a 
voice not partaking of the Italian fervour too much to be 
gentle. She had just enough of it to give her speaking a 
grace. None of her graces appeared entirely free from art ; 
nor, on the other hand, did they betray enough of it to give 
you an ill opinion of her sincerity and good humour. I was 
told that her Eomagnese dialect was observable; but to me, 
at that time, all Italian in a lady's mouth was Tuscan pearl; 
and she trolled it over her lip, pure or not, with that sort of 
conscious grace which seems to belong to the Italian language 
as a matter of right. I amused her with speaking bad Italian 
out of Ariosto, and saying speme for speranza ; in which she 
good-naturedly found something pleasant and pellegrino ; 
keeping all the while that considerate countenance for which 
a foreigner has so much to be grateful. Her hair was what 
the poet has described, or rather blond^ with an inclination to 
yellow; a very fair and delicate yellow, at all events, and 
within the limits of the poetical. She had regular features, 
of the order properly called handsome, in distinction to pretti- 
ness or to piquancy ; being well proportioned to one another, 
large rather than otherwise, but without coarseness, and more 
harmonious than interesting. Her nose was the handsomest 
of the kind I ever saw; and I have known her both smile 
very sweetly, and look intelligently, when Lord Byron has 
said something kind to her. 

In the evening we sometimes rode or drove out, generally 
into the country. The city I first walked through in com- 
pany with Shelley, but speedily, alas ! explored it by myself, 
or with my children. The state of my wife's health would 
not suffer her to quit her apartment. 

Let the reader imagine a small white city, with a tower 
leaning at one end of it, trees on either side, and blue moun- 
tains for the background ; and he may fancy he sees Pisa, as 
the traveller sees it in coming from Leghorn. Add to this, 
in summer-time, fields of corn on all sides, bordered with 
hedgerow trees, and the festoons of vines, of which he has 
so often read, hanging from tree to tree ; and he may judge of 
the impression made upon an admirer of Italy, who is in 
Tuscany for the first time. 



LORD BYRON IN ITALY— SHELLEY — PISA. 297 

In entering the city, the impression is not injured. What 
looked white in the distance, remains as pure and fair on 
closer acquaintance. You cross a bridge, and cast your eye 
up the whole extent of the city one way, the river Arno (the 
river of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio) winding through the 
middle of it under two more bridges ; and fair, elegant houses 
of good size bordering the white pavement on either side. 
This is the Lung' Arno, or street " Along the Arno." The 
mountains, in which you fancy you see the marble veins (for 
it is from these that the marble of Carrara comes), tower 
away beautifully at the further end, and, owing to the clear 
atmosphere, seem to be much nearer than they are. The 
Arno, which is about as wide perhaps as the Isis at Oxford, 
is sandy- coloured, and in the summer-time shrunken ; but 
still it is the river of the great Tuscan writers, the visible 
possessor of the name we have all heard a thousand times ; 
and we feel what a true thing is that which is called ideal. 

The first novelty that strikes you, after your dreams and 
matter-of-fact have recovered from the surprise of their in- 
troduction to one another, is the singular fairness and new 
look of houses that have been standing hundreds of years. 
This is owing to the dryness of the Italian atmosphere. An- 
tiquity refuses to look ancient in Italy. It insists upon 
retaining its youthfulness of aspect. The consequence at first 
is a mixed feeling of admiration and disappointment; for we 
miss the venerable. The houses seem as if they ought to 
have sympathized more with humanity, and were as cold 
and as hard-hearted as their materials. But you discover 
that Italy is the land, not of the venerable, but the beautiful ; 
and cease to look for old age in the chosen country of the 
Apollo and the Venus. The only real antiquities are those 
in Dante and the oldest painters, who treat of the Bible in 
an ancient style. Among the mansions on the Lung' Arno is 
one entirely fronted with marble, and marble so pure and 
smooth that you can see your face in it. It is in a most 
graceful style of architecture ; and over the door has a mys- 
terious motto and symbol. The symbol is an actual fetter, 
attached with great nicety to the middle stone over the door- 
way: the motto, Alia Giomata (By the Day, or the Day's 
Work). The allusion is supposed to be to some captivity 
undergone by one of the Lanfreducci family, the proprietors : 
but nobody knows. Further up on the same side of the 
way, is the old ducal palace, said to be the scene of the 



298 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

murder of Don Garcia by his father, which is the subject 
of one of Alfieri's tragedies : and between both, a little be- 
fore you come to the old palace, is the mansion before men- 
tioned, in which he resided, and which still belongs to the 
family of the Lanfranchi, formerly one of the most powerful 
in Pisa. They were among the nobles who conspired against 
the ascendancy of Count Ugolino, and who were said, but not 
truly, to have wreaked that revenge on him and his children, 
recorded without a due knowledge of the circumstances by 
Dante, The tower in which Ugolino perished was subse- 
quently called the Tower of Famine. Chaucer, who is sup- 
posed to have been in Italy, says that it stood " a littel out" 
of Pisa ; Yillani says, in the Piazza of the Anziani. It is under- 
stood to be no longer in existence, and even its site is disputed. 
It is curious to feel oneself sitting quietly in one of the old 
Italian houses, and to think of all the passions that have 
agitated the hearts of so many generations of its tenants; all 
the revels and the quarrels that have echoed along its wall ; 
all the guitars that have tinkled under its windows: all the 
scuffles that have disputed its doors. Along the great halls, 
how many feet have hurried in alarm! how many stately 
beauties have drawn their trains ! how many torches have 
ushered magnificence up the staircases! how much blood 
perhaps been shed ! The ground-floors of all the great 
houses in Pisa, as in other Italian cities, have iron bars at 
the windows. They were for security in time of trouble. 
The look is at first very gloomy and prison-like, but you get 
used to it. The bars are round, and painted white, and the 
interstices are large ; and if the windows look towards a gar- 
den, and are bordered with shrubs and ivy, as those at the 
back were in the Casa Lanfranchi, the imagination makes a 
compromise with their prison-like appearance, and persuades 
itself they are but comforts in times of war, and trellises 
during a peace establishment. All the floors are made for 
separate families, it having been the custom in Italy from 
time immemorial for fathers and mothers, sons and daughters- 
in-law, or vice versa, with as many other relations as might 
be " agreeable," to live under the same roof. Spaciousness and 
utility were the great objects with the builder; and a stranger 
is sometimes surprised with the look of the finest houses 
outside, particularly the arrangement of the ground-floor. 
The stables used often to be there, and their place is now as 
often occupied by shops. In the inside of the great private 



LOED BYRON IN ITALY— SHELLEY— PISA. 299 

houses there is always a certain majestic amplitude; but the 
entrances of the rooms, and the staircase on the ground floor, 
are often placed irregularly, so as to sacrifice everything to 
convenience. In the details there is sure to be a noble eye to 
proportion. You cannot look at the elevation of the com- 
monest doorway, or the ceiling of a room appropriated to 
the humblest purposes, but you recognise the land of the 
fine arts. You think Michael Angelo has been at the turn- 
ing of those arches — at the harmonizing of those beautiful 
varieties of shade, which, by the secret principles common to 
all arts and sciences, affect the mind like a sort of inaudible 
music. The very plasterer who is hired to give the bare 
walls of some old disused apartment an appearance of orna- 
ment, paints his door -ways, his pilasters, and his borders of 
leaves, in a bold style of relief and illusion, which would 
astonish the doubtful hand of many an English student " in 
the higher walks of art." It must be observed, however, that 
this is a piece of good taste which seems to have survived 
most others, and to have been kept up by the objects on which 
it works ; for the arts are at present lying fallow in Italy, 
waiting for better times. 

I was so taken up, on my arrival at Pisa, with friends and 
their better novelties, that I forgot even to look about me for 
the Leaning Tower. You lose sight of it on entering the 
town, unless you come in at the Lucca gate. On the Sunday 
following, however, I went to see it, and the spot where it 
stands, in illustrious company. Forsyth, a late traveller of 
much shrewdness and pith (though a want of ear, and an 
affectation of ultra good sense, rendered him in some respects 
extremely unfit for a critic on Italy — as when he puts music 
and perfumery on a level !), had been beforehand with the 
spot in putting this idea in my head. " Pisa," says he, 
11 while the capital of a republic, was celebrated for its pro- 
fusion of marble, its patrician towers, and its grave magni- 
ficence. It still can boast some marble churches, a marble 
palace, and a marble bridge. Its towers, though no longer a 
mark of nobility, may be traced in the walls of modernized 
houses. Its gravity pervades every street; but its magnifi- 
cence is now confined to one sacred corner. There stand the 
Cathedral, the Baptistery, the Leaning Tower, and the Campo 
Santo ; all built of the same marble, all varieties of the same 
architecture, all venerable with years, and fortunate both in 
their society and in their solitude." 



300 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

I know not whether my first sensation at the sight of the 
Leaning Tower, was admiration of its extreme beauty, or 
astonishment at its posture. Its beauty has never been suffi- 
ciently praised. Its overhanging seems to menace the houses 
beneath it with destruction. The inclination is fourteen feet 
out of the perpendicular. We are amazed that people should 
build houses underneath it, till we recollect that it has pro- 
bably stood thus ever since it was built, that is to say, for 
nearly six hundred and fifty years ; and that habit reconciles 
us to anything. Something of a curve backwards is given to 
it. The structure was begun by a German artist, William of 
Inspruck, and finished by Italians. Several other towers in 
Pisa, including the Observatory, have a manifest inclination, 
owing to the same cause, — the sinking of the soil, which is 
light, sandy, and full of springs.* 

With regard to the company in which it stands, let the 
reader imagine a broad grass-walk, standing in the solitary 
part of a country town. Let him suppose at one end of this 
walk the Leaning Tower, with a row of small but elegant 
houses right under the inclination, and looking down the 
grass-plot ; the Baptistery, a rotunda, standing by itself at the 
opposite end ; the public hospital, an extremely neat and quiet 
building, occupying the principal length of the road which 
borders the grass-plot on one side; on the other side, and on 
the grass itself, the cathedral, stretching between the Leaning 
Tower and the Baptistery; and lastly, at the back of the 
cathedral, and visible between the openings at its two ends, 
the Campo Santo (Holy Field) or burial-ground, walled in 
with marble cloisters full of the oldest paintings in Italy. All 
these buildings are detached; they all stand in a free, open 
situation ; they all look as if they were built but a year ago ; 
they are all of marble; the whole place is kept extremely 
clean, — the very grass in a state of greenness not common to 
turf in the south ; and there are trees looking upon it over a 
wall next the Baptistery. Let the reader add to this scene a 
few boys playing about, all ready to answer your questions in 
pure Tuscan, — women occasionally passing with veils or bare 

* Upon reflection, since the appearance of the first edition of this 
book, I cannot help thinking, after all, that the inclination of this 
famous tower so much out of the perpendicular, must have taken place 
long after it was completed ; that it was left standing as it does, after 
long and anxious watching for the consequences ; and that anything 
which architecture may have done by way of counteraction, could 
only have ensued upon experience of the tower's safety. 



LORD BYRON IN ITALY — SHELLEY — PISA. 301 

heads, or now and then a couple of friars; and though finer 
individual sights may be found in the world, it will be difficult 
to come upon an assemblage of objects more rich in their 
combination. 

The Baptistery is a large rotunda, richly carved, and appro- 
priated solely to the purpose after which it was christened. 
It: is in a mixed style, and was built in the twelfth century. 
Forsyth, who is deep in arches and polygons, objects to the 
crowd of unnecessary columns; to the " hideous tunnel which 
conceals the fine swell of the cupola;" and to the appro- 
priation of so large an edifice to a christening. The " tunnel" 
may deserve his " wrath ; " but his architectural learning some- 
times behaves as ill as the tunnel. It obscures his better 
taste. A christening, in the eyes of a good Catholic, is at 
least as important an object as a rotunda; and there is a re- 
ligious sentiment in the profusion with which ornament is 
heaped upon edifices of this nature. It forms a beauty of 
itself, and gives even mediocrity a sort of abundance of inten- 
tion that looks like the wealth of genius. The materials take 
leave of their materiality, and crowd together into a worship 
of their own. It is no longer "let everything" only "that 
has breath praise the Lord;" but let everything else praise 
him, and take a meaning and life accordingly. Let column 
obscure column, as in a multitude of men; let arch strain 
upon arch, as if to ascend to heaven; let there be infinite 
details, conglomerations, mysteries, lights, darknesses ; and 
let the birth of a new soul be celebrated in the midst of all. 

The cathedral is in the Greek style of the middle ages, a 
style which this writer thinks should rather be called the 
Lombard, " as it appeared in Italy first under the Lombard 
princes." He says, that it includes " whatever was grand or 
beautiful in the works of the middle ages; " and that " this 
was perhaps the noblest of them all." He proceeds to find 
fault with certain incongruities, amongst which are some 
remains of Pagan sculpture left standing in a Christian church ; 
but he enthusiastically admires the pillars of oriental granite 
that support the roof. The outside of the building consists 
of mere heaps of marble, mounting by huge steps to the roof; 
but their simplicity as well as size gives them a new sort of 
grandeur ; and Mr. Forsyth has overlooked the extraordinary 
sculpture of the bronze doors, worthy of the same hand that 
made those others at Florence, which Michael Angelo said 
were fit to be the gates of Paradise. It is divided into com- 



302 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

partments, the subjects of which are taken from Scripture. 
The relief is the most graceful and masterly conceivable; the 
perspective astonishing, as if in drawing; and equal justice is 
done to the sharp monstrosities of the devil with his bat- 
wings, and to the gentle graces of Jesus. There is a great 
number of pictures in the cathedral, good enough to assist 
rather than spoil the effect, but not remarkable. I never was 
present when the church -service was at its best; but the 
leader did not seem to rely much on his singers, by the noise 
which he made in beating time. His vehement roll of paper 
sounded like the lashing of a whip. 

One evening, in August, I saw the whole inside of the 
cathedral lit up with wax in honour of the Assumption. The 
lights were disposed with much taste, but produced a great 
heat. There was a gigantic picture of the Virgin displayed at 
the upjoer end, who was to be supposed sitting in heaven, sur- 
rounded with the celestial ardours; but she was "dark with 
excess of bright.' , It is impossible to see this profusion of 
lights, especially when one knows their symbolical meaning, 
without being struck with the source from which Dante took 
his idea of the beatified spirits. His heaven, filled with 
lights, and lights too, arranged in figures, which glow with 
lustre in proportion to the beatitude of the souls within them, 
is the sublimation of a Catholic church. And so far it is 
heavenly indeed, for nothing escapes the look of materiality 
like fire. It is so airy, joyous, and divine a thing, when 
separated from the idea of pain and an ill purpose, that the 
language of happiness naturally adopts its terms, and can tell 
of nothing more rapturous than burning bosoms and sparkling 
eyes. The Seraph of the Hebrew theology was a fire. But 
then the materials of heaven and hell are the same ? Yes ; 
and a very fine piece of moral theology might be made out of 
their sameness, always omitting the brute injustice of eternal 
punishment. Is it not by our greater or less cultivation of 
health and benevolence, that we all make out our hells and 
heavens upon earth ? by a turning of the same materials and 
passions of which we are all composed to different accounts ; 
burning now in the horrors of hell with fear, hatred, and un~ 
charitableness, and now in the joys, or at least the happiest 
sympathies of heaven, with good effort and courage, with 
gratitude, generosity, and love? 

The crowning glory of Pisa is the Campo Santo. I entered 
for the first time at twilight^ when the indistinct shapes, 



LOUD BYRON IN ITALY— SHELLEY — PISA. 303 

colours, and antiquity of the old paintings wonderfully har- 
monized with the nature of the place. I chose to go towards 
evening, when I saw it again ; and though the sunset came 
upon me too fast to allow me to see all the pictures as minutely 
as I could have wished, I saw enough to warrant my giving 
an opinion of them ; and I again had the pleasure of standing 
in the spot at twilight. It is an oblong enclosure, about the 
size of Stratford Place, and surrounded with cloisters wider 
and lighter than those of Westminster. At least, such was my 
impression. The middle is grassed earth, the surface of which, 
for some depth, is said to have been brought from Palestine at 
the time of the crusades, and to possess the virtue of decom- 
posing bodies in the course of a few hours. The tradition is, 
that Ubaldo Lanfranchi, Archbishop of Pisa, who commanded 
the forces contributed by his countrymen, brought the earth 
away with him in his ships ; but though such a proceeding 
would not have been impossible, the story is now, I believe, 
regarded as a mere legend. The decomposition of the bodies 
might have been effected by other means. Persons are buried 
both in this enclosure and in the cloisters, but only persons of 
rank or celebrity. Most of the inscriptions for instance (of 
which there are some hundreds, all on marble, and mixed 
with busts and figures), are to the memory of Pisans in the 
rank of nobility ; but there are several also to artists and men 
of letters. The most interesting grave is that of Benozzo, 
one of the old painters, who lies at the feet of his works. 

The paintings on the walls, the great glory of Pisa, are by 
Orgagna, Simon Memmi, Giotto, Buffalmacco, Benozzo, and 
others — all more or less renowned by illustrious pens; all, 
with more or less gusto, the true and reverend harbingers of 
the greatest painters of Italy. Simon Memmi is the artist 
celebrated by Petrarch for his portrait of Laura ; Buffalmacco 
is the mad wag (grave enough here) who cuts such a figure in 
the old Italian novels ; and Giotto, the greatest of them all, is 
the friend of Dante, the hander down of his likeness to pos- 
terity, and himself the Dante of his art, without the drawbacks 
of satire and sorrow. His works have the same real character, 
the imaginative mixture of things familiar with things un- 
earthly, the same strenuous and (when they choose) gentle 
expression, — in short, the same true discernment of the " dif- 
ferences of things," now grappling with a fiend or a fierce 
thought, now sympathising with fear and sorrow, now setting 
hard the teeth of grim warriors, now dissolving in the looks 



304 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HTOT. 

and flowing tresses of women, or putting a young gallant in 
an attitude to which Eaphael might have traced his cavaliers. 
And this is more or less the character of the very oldest pic- 
tures in the Campo Santo. They have the germs of beauty 
and greatness, however obscured and stiffened ; the struggle 
of true pictorial feeling with the inexperience of art. As you 
proceed along the walls, you see gracefulness and knowledge 
gradually helping one another, and legs and arms, lights, 
shades, and details of all sorts taking their proper measures 
and positions, as if every separate thing in the world of paint- 
ing had been created with repeated efforts, till it answered the 
fair idea. They are like a dream of humanity during the 
twilight of creation. 

I have already mentioned that the pictures are painted on 
the walls of the four cloisters. They occupy the greater part 
of the elevation of these walls, beginning at top and finishing 
at a reasonable distance from the pavement. The subjects 
are from the Old Testament up to the time of Solomon, from 
the legends of the middle ages, particularly St. Eanieri (the 
patron saint of Pisa) and from the history of the Crucifixion, 
Eesurrection, &c, with the Day of Judgment. There is also 
a Triumph of Death. The colours of some of them, espe- 
cially of the sky and ship in the voyage of St. Eanieri, are 
wonderfully preserved. The sky looks as blue as the finest 
out of doors. But others are much injured by the sea air, 
which blows into Pisa ; and it is a pity that the windows of 
the cloisters in these quarters are not glazed, to protect them 
from further injury. The best idea, perhaps, which I can 
give an Englishman of the general character of the paintings, 
is by referring him to the engravings of Albert Durer, and 
the serious parts of Chaucer. There is the same want of pro- 
per costume — the same intense feeling of the human being, 
both in body and soul — the same bookish, romantic, and re- 
tired character — the same evidences, in short, of antiquity 
and commencement, weak (where it is weak) for want of a 
settled art and language, but strong for that very reason in first 
impulses, and in putting down all that is felt. An old poet, 
however, always has the advantage of an old painter, because 
he is not bound to a visible exhibition of arms, legs, and atti- 
tudes, and thus escapes the artistical defects of the time. But 
they truly illustrate one another. Chaucer's Duke Theseus, 
clothed and behaving accordingly — his yawning courtiers, 
who thank King Cambuscan for dismissing them to bed — his 



LORD BYROX IN ITALY— SHELLEY— PISA. 305 

god Janus keeping Christmas with his fireside and his dish of 
brawn, &c. — exhibit the same fantastic mixtures of violated 
costume and truth of nature. The way in which the great 
old poet mingles together personages of all times, nations, and 
religions, real and fictitious, Samson and Turnus with Socrates, 
Ovid with St. Augustin, &c, and his descriptions of actual 
11 purtreyings on a wall," in which are exhibited, in one and 
the 'same scene, Narcissus, Solomon, Venus, Croesus, and 
" the porter Idleness,' ' resemble the manner in which some of 
the painters in the Campo Santo defy all perspective, and fill 
one picture with twenty different solitudes. There is a paint- 
ing, for instance, devoted to the celebrated anchorites, or her- 
mits of the desert. They are represented according to their 
several legends — reading, dying, undergoing temptations, as- 
sisted by lions, &c. At first they all look like fantastic actors 
in the same piece ; but you dream, and are reconciled. 

The contempt of everything like interval, and of all which 
may have happened in it, makes the ordinary events of life 
seem of as little moment; and the mind is exclusively occu- 
pied with the sacred old men and their solitudes, all at the 
same time, and yet each by himself. The manner in which 
some of the hoary saints in these pictures pore over their 
books, and carry their decrepit old age, full of a bent and 
absorbed feebleness — the set limbs of the warriors on horse- 
back—the sidelong unequivocal looks of some of the ladies 
playing on harps, and conscious of their ornaments — the 
people of fashion, seated in rows, with Time coming up un- 
awares to destroy them — the other rows of elders and doctors 
of the church, forming part of the array of heaven — the 
uplifted hand of Christ denouncing the wicked at the Day of 
Judgment — the daring satires occasionally introduced against 
monks and nuns — the profusion of attitudes, expressions, 
incidents, broad draperies, ornaments of all sorts, visions, 
mountains, ghastly-looking cities, fiends, angels, sibylline old 
women, dancers, virgin brides, mothers and children, princes, 
patriarchs, dying saints; — it would be a simply blind injustice 
to the superabundance and truth of conception in all this 
multitude of imagery not to recognise the real inspirers as 
well as harbingers of Kaphael and Michael Angelo, instead of 
confining the honour to the Masaccios and Peruginos. The 
Masaccios and Peruginos, for all that ever I saw, meritorious 
as they are, are no more to be compared with them than the 
sonneteers of Henry the Eighth's time are to be compared 

20 



306 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 0? LEIGH HUNT. 

with Chaucer. Even in the very rudest of the pictures, 
where the souls of the dying are going out of their mouths 
in the shape of little children, there are passages not unworthy 
of Dante or Michael Angelo — angels trembling at the blowing 
of trumpets ; men in vain attempting to carry their friends 
into heaven ; and saints who have lived ages of temperance, 
sitting in calm air upon hills far above the progress of Death, 
who goes bearing down the great, the luxurious, and the 
young. The picture by Titian (or Giorgione), in which he 
has represented the three great stages of existence, bubble- 
blowing childhood, love-making manhood, and death-con- 
templating old age, is not better conceived, and hardly better 
made out, than some of the designs of Orgagna and Giotto. 

Since I have beheld the Campo Santo I have enriched my 
day-dreams and my stock of the admirable, and am thankful 
that I have names by heart to which I owe homage and grati- 
tude. Giotto, be thou one to me hereafter, of a kindred 
brevity, solidity, and stateliness, with that of thy friend 
Dante, and far happier ! Tender and noble Orgagna, be thou 
blessed for ever beyond the happiness of thine own heaven ! 

The air of Pisa is soft and balmy to the last degree. A 
look out upon the Lung 'Arno at noon is curious. A blue sky 
is overhead — dazzling stone underneath — the yellow Arno 
gliding along, generally with nothing upon it, sometimes a 
lazy sail; the houses on the opposite side, with their green 
blinds down, appear to be asleep ; and nobody passes but a 
few labourers, carmen, or countrywomen in their veils and 
handkerchiefs, hastening with bare feet, but never too fast to 
lose a certain air of strut and stateliness. Dante, in one of 
his love poems praises his mistress for walking like a peacock ; 
nay, even like a crane, straight above herself ; — 
" Soave a guisa va di un bel pavone, 
Diritta sopra se, coma una grua." 

Sweetly she goes, like the bright peacock ; straight 
Above herself, like to the lady crane. 

This is the common walk of Italian women, rich and poor. 
To an English eye, at first it seems wanting in a certain 
modesty and moral grace ; but you see what the grave poet 
thinks of it, and it is not associated in an Italian mind with 
any such deficiency. That it has a beauty of its own is certain. 
Solitary as Pisa may look at noon, it is only by comparison 
with what you find in very populous cities. Its desolate 
aspect is much exaggerated. The people, for the most part, 



LOUD BYROK IS ITALY— SHELLEY— PISA. 307 

sit in shade at their doors in the hottest weather, so that it 
cannot look so solitary as many parts of London at the same 
time of the year; and though it is true that grass grows in 
some of the streets, it is only in the remotest. The streets, 
for the most part, are kept very neat and clean, not excepting 
the poorest alleys ; a benefit arising not only from the fine 
pavement which is everywhere to be found, but from the wise 
use to which criminals are put. The punishment of death is 
not kept up in Tuscany. Eobbers, and even murderers, are 
made to atone for the ill they have done by the good works 
of sweeping and keeping clean. A great murderer on the 
English stage used formerly to be dressed in a suit of brick- 
dust. In Tuscany, or at least in Pisa, robbers condemned to 
this punishment are clothed in a red livery, and murderers in 
a yellow. A stranger looks with a feeling more grave than 
curiosity at these saffron-coloured anomalies quietly doing 
their duty in the streets, and not seeming to avoid observa- 
tion. But, in fact, they look just like other men. They are 
either too healthy by temperance and exercise to exhibit a con- 
science, or think they make up by their labour for so trifling 
an ebullition of animal spirits. And they have a good deal 
to say for themselves, considering that circumstances modify- 
all men, and that the labour is in chains and for life. 

The inhabitants of Pisa, in general, are not reckoned a 
favourable specimen of Tuscan looks. You are sure to meet 
fine faces in any large assembly, but the common run is bad 
enough. They are hard, prematurely aged, and what ex- 
pression there is, is worldly. Some of them have no expres- 
sion whatever, but are as destitute of speculation and feeling 
as masks. The bad Italian face and the good Italian face are 
the extremes of insensibility and the reverse. But it is rare 
that the eyes are not fine ; and the females have a profusion 
of good hair. Lady Morgan has remarked the promising 
countenances of Italian children, compared with what they 
turn out to be as they grow older ; and she adds, with equal 
justice, that it is an evident affair of government and educa- 
tion. You doubly pity the corruptions of a people who, be- 
sides their natural genius, preserve in the very midst of their 
sophistication a frankness distinct from it, and an entire free- 
dom from affectation. An Italian annoys you neither with 
his pride like an Englishman, nor with his vanity like a 
Frenchman. He is quiet and natural, self-possessed without 
wrapping himself up in a corner, and ready for cheerfulness 

20—2 



SOS AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT* 

without grimace. His frankness sometimes takes the air of a 
simplicity, at once misplaced and touching. A young man, 
who exhibited a taste for all good and generous sentiments, 
and who, according to the representation of his friends, was 
a very worthy as well as ingenious person, did not scruple to 
tell me one day, as a matter of course, that he made a point 
of getting acquainted with rich families, purely to be invited 
to their houses and partake of their good things. Many an 
Englishman would do this, but he would hardly be so frank 
about it, especially to a stranger ; nor would an Englishman 
of the same tastes in other respects be easily found to act so. 
But it is the old story of " following the multitude to do evil," 
and is no doubt accounted a matter of necessity and common 
sense. 

There seems a good deal of talent for music among the 
Pisans, which does not know how to make its way. You 
never hear the poorest melody, but somebody strikes in with 
what he can muster up of a harmony. Boys go about of an 
evening, and parties sit at their doors, singing popular airs, 
and hanging as long as possible on the last chord. It is not 
an uncommon thing for gentlemen to play their guitars as 
they go along to a party. I heard one evening a voice singing 
past a window, that would not have disgraced an opera ; and 
I once walked behind a common post-boy, who, in default of 
having another to help him to a harmony, contrived to make 
chords of all his notes, by rapidly sounding the second and 
the treble, one after the other. The whole people are bitten 
with a new song, and hardly sing anything else till the next. 
There were two epidemic airs of this kind when I was there, 
which had been imported from Florence, and which the in- 
habitants sang from morning till night, though they were 
nothing remarkable. Yet Pisa is said to be the least fond of 
music of any city in Tuscany. 

Pisa is a tranquil, an imposing, and even now a beautiful 
and stately city. It looks like what it is, the residence of an 
university : many parts of it seem made up of colleges ; and 
we feel as if we ought to " walk gowned." It possesses the 
Campo Santo ; its river is the river of Tuscan poetry, and 
furnished Michael Angelo with the subject of his cartoon ; 
and it disputes with Florence the birth of Galileo. Here, at 
all events, the great astronomer studied and taught : here his 
mind was born, and another great impulse given to the pro- 
gress of philosophy and liberal opinion. 



309 



CHAPTER XX. 

GENOA. 

Towards the end of September, Lord Byron and myself, in 
different parties, left Pisa for Genoa. Tuscany had been ren- 
dered uncomfortable to him by the misadventures both there 
and at Leghorn ; and at Genoa he would hover on the borders 
of his inclination for Greece. Perhaps he had already made 
arrangements for going thither. 

On our way to Genoa we met at Lerici. He had an illness 
at that place ; and all my melancholy was put to its height by 
seeing the spot which my departed friend had lived in, and his 
solitary mansion on the sea-shore. Lerici is wild and retired, 
with a bay and rocky eminences ; the people suited to it, 
something between inhabitants of sea and land. In the sum- 
mer time they will be up ail night dabbling in the water and 
making wild noises. Here Trelawny joined us. He took me 
to the Villa Magni (the house just alluded to) ; and we paced 
over its empty rooms and neglected garden. The sea fawned 
upon the shore, as though it could do no harm. 

At Lerici we had an earthquake. The shock was the 
smartest we experienced in Italy. At Pisa there had been 
a dull intimation of one, such as happens in that city about 
once in three years. In the neighbourhood of Florence we 
had another, less dull, but lasting only for an instant. It was 
exactly as if somebody with a strong hand had jerked a pole 
up against the ceiling of the lower room right under one's feet. 
This was at Maiano, among the Fiesolan hills. People came 
out of their rooms, and inquired of one another what was the 
matter. At Lerici I awoke at dawn with an extraordinary 
sensation, and directly afterwards the earthquake took place. 
It was strong enough to shake the pictures on the wall ; and 
it lasted a sufficient time to resemble the rolling of a w r aggon 
under an archway, which it did both in noise and movement. 
I got up and went to the window. The people were already 
collecting in the open place beneath it ; and I heard, in the 
clear morning air, the word Terremoto (earthquake) repeated 
from one to another. The sensation for the next ten minutes 
or so was very distressing. You expected the shock to come 
again, and to be w r orse. However, we had no more of it. 
We congratulated ourselves the more, because there was a 



310 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. 

tower on a rock just above our heads, which, would have stood 
upon no ceremony with our inn. They told us, if I remember, 
that they had an earthquake on this part of the coast of Italy 
about once every five years. Italy is a land of volcanoes, more 
or less subdued. It is a great grapery, built over a flue. If 
the earthquake did not come, it was thought the crops were 
not so good. 

From Lerici we proceeded part of our way by water, as far 
as Sestri. Lord Byron went in a private boat ; Trelawny in 
another ; myself and family in a felucca. It was pretty to 
see the boats with their white sails, gliding by the rocks over 
that blue sea. A little breeze coming on, our seamen were 
afraid, and put into Porto Venere, a deserted town a short 
distance from Lerici. 

After resting a few hours, we put forth again, and had a 
lazy, sunny passage to Sestri, where a crowd of people assailed 
us, like savages at an island, for our patronage and portman- 
teaux. They were robust, clamorous, fishy fellows, like so 
many children of the Tritons in Raphael's pictures ; as if those 
plebeian gods of the sea had been making love to Italian 
chambermaids. Italian goddesses have shown a taste not un- 
similar, and more condescending ; and English ones, too, in 
Italy, if scandal is to be believed. But Naples is the head- 
quarters of this overgrowth of wild luxury. Marino, a 
Neapolitan, may have had it in his eye when he wrote that 
fine sonnet of his, full of gusto, brawny and bearded, about 
Triton pursuing Cymothoe. (See Parnaso Italiano, torn. 41, 
p. 10.) 

From Sestri we proceeded over the maritime part of the 
Apennines to Genoa. Their character is of the least interest- 
ing sort of any mountains, being neither distinct nor wooded ; 
but undulating, barren, and coarse ; without any grandeur but 
what arises from an excess of that appearance. They lie in a 
succession of great doughy billows, like so much enormous 
pudding, or petrified mud. 

Genoa again ! — With what different feelings we beheld it 
from those which enchanted us the first time ! Mrs. Shelley, 
who preceded us, had found houses both for Lord Byron's 
family and my own at Albaro, a neighbouring village on a hill. 
We were to live in the same house with her ; and in the Casa 
Negrotto we accordingly found an English welcome. There 
were forty rooms in it, some of them such as would be con- 
sidered splendid in England, and all neat and new, with 



GENOA. 311 

borders and arabesques. The balcony and staircase were of 
marble; and there was a little flower-garden. The rent of 
this house was twenty pounds a year. Lord Byron paid four- 
and- twenty for his, which was older and more imposing, and 
a good piece of ground. It was called the Casa Saluzzi.* 
Mr. Landor and his family had occupied a house in the same 
village — the Casa Pallavicini. He has recorded an interesting 
dialogue that took place in it, j Of Albaro, and the city itself, 
I shall speak more at large in the course of the chapter. 

The Genoese post brought us the first number of our new 
quarterly, the Liberal, accompanied both with hopes and fears, 
the latter of which were too speedily realized. Living now in 
a separate house from Lord Byron, I saw less of him than 
before ; and, under all the circumstances, it was as well : for 
though we had always been on what are called " good terms," 
the cordiality did not increase. His friends in England, who, 
after what had lately taken place there in his instance, were 
opposed, naturally enough, to his opening new fields of pub- 
licity, did what they could to prevent his .taking a hearty 
interest in the Liberal; and I must confess that I did not 
mend the matter by my own inability to fall in cordially with 
his ways, and by a certain jealousy of my position, which pre- 
vented me, neither very wisely nor justly, from manifesting 
the admiration due to his genius, and reading the manuscripts 
he showed me with a becoming amount of thanks and good 
words. I think he had a right to feel this want of accord in 
a companion, whatever might be its value. A dozen years 
later, reflection would have made me act very differently. At 
the same time, though the Liberal had no mean success, he 
unquestionably looked to its having a far greater; and the 
result of all these combined circumstances was, that the in- 
terest he took in it cooled in proportion as it should have 
grown warm, and after four numbers it ceased. They were 
all published during our residence in this part of Italy. Lord 
Byron contributed some poems, to which his customary pub- 
lisher had objected on account of their fault-finding in Church 
and State, and their critical attacks on acquaintances. Among 

* Are the Saluzzi family from Chaucer's Country of Saluces, whose 
"Markis" married the patient Griselda? Saluces was in the mari- 
time Apennines, by Piedmont, and might have originated a family of 
Genoese nobles. Classical and romantic associations meet us in such 
abundance at every turn in Italy, that upon the least hint a book 
speaketh. 

Imaginary Conversations, vol. i. p. 179, second edition. 



812 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

them was the Vision of Judgment, the best satire since the 
days of Pope. Churchill's satires, compared with it, are 
bludgeons compared with steel of Damascus. Hazlitt contri- 
buted some of the most entertaining of his vigorous essays ; 
and Shelley had left us his masterly translation of the May- 
Day Night in Faust, As to myself, if I may speak of my 
own articles after these, I wrote by far the greater number, — 
perhaps nearly half the publication ; but I was ill ; and with 
the exception of one or two, I hope they were not among my 
best. This, however, did not hinder great puzzlement among 
the critics of that day. I say it with not the slightest inten- 
tion of self-compliment ; and I should think him a very dull 
fellow who supposed it. 

Puzzlement and posement of various sorts awaited many 
readers of the Liberal. A periodical work which is under- 
stood to be written by known authors, whose names are, 
nevertheless, unaffixed to their contributions, has the disad- 
vantage of hazarding uneasiness to the minds of such readers 
as pique themselves on knowing a man's style without really 
being sure of it. They long to assign the articles to this and 
that author, but they fear to be mistaken. The perplexity 
irritates them ; they are forced to wait the judgments of 
others ; and they willingly comfort the wound given to their 
self-love by siding with such as are unfavourable, and pro- 
nouncing the articles to be of an undistinguishable mediocrity. 
I do not know how far this kind of dilemma may have injured 
the Liberal. I suspect it had no little effect. But what must 
have exasperated, while it consoled it, critics of an opposite 
kind were sometimes as much in the wrong as the former 
were afraid of being. A signal instance occurred in the case 
of a writer not disesteemed in his day, whose name I suppress, 
because the mention of it might disconcert some relation. 
One of the poems in the Liberal is entitled the Booh of 
Beginnings. Its subject is poetical exordiums. The writer 
in question attributed it to Lord Byron ; and after denouncing 
the " atheists and scoffers," by whom, he said, his lordship 
had been " led into defiance of the sacred writings," thus pro- 
ceeded to notice a religious passage from Dryden, which was 
quoted with admiration in the notes to the poem : — 

" In vain was Lord Byron led into the defiance of the sacred 
writings; there are passages in his letters and in his works which 
show that religion might have been in his soul. Could he recite the 
following lines and resist the force of them? It is true that he marks 



GENOA. 313 

thera for the beauty of the verse, but no less for the sublimity of the 
conception; and I cannot but hope that, bad he lived, he would have 
proved another instance of genius bowing to the power of truth." 

Now the poem in question, and the notes to it, were written 
by myself, one of those " atheists and scoffers " (according to 
this gentleman), by whom the supposed writer of the poem 
had been " led into defiance of the sacred writings." 

This person knew as little of my religion as he knew of an 
author's manner. Among these same notes of mine is the 
following passage : — 

"What divine plays would not Beaumont and Fletcher have left; 
us, if they had not been fine gentlemen about town, and ambitious to 
please a perishing generation! Their muse is like an accomplished 
country beauty, of the most exquisite kind, seduced up to town, and 
made familiar with the most devilish parts of it, yet retaining, through 
all her debauchery, a sweet regret and an adoring fondness for nature. 
She has lilies about her paint and patch-boxes, and loves them almost 
as much as when she was a child." 

I do not think that the author of Don Juan was accus- 
tomed to make critical reflections of that sort, I do not 
allude, of course, to the writing, but to the sentiment. But 
the poem was written in the stanza of Don Juan, and, there- 
fore, his Lordship was to be complimented with the religion 
of it, at the expense of his Juanity. 

I will take this opportunity of recording some more anec- 
dotes as they occur to me. My neighbour and myself used 
to walk in the grounds of the Casa Saluzzi ; talking for the 
most part of indifferent things, and endeavouring to joke 
away the consciousness of our position. We joked even upon 
our differences of opinion. It was a jest between us, that 
the only book that was a thorough favourite on both sides, 
was Boswell's Life of Johnson. I used to talk of Johnson 
when I saw him disturbed, or when I wished to avoid other 
subjects. He asked me one day how I should have felt in 
Johnson's company. I said it was difficult to judge ; because, 
living in other times, and one's character being modified by 
them, I could not help thinking of myself as I was now, and 
Johnson as he was in times previous : so that it appeared 
to me that I should have been somewhat " Jacobinical " in 
his company, and not disposed to put up with his ipse dixits. 
He said that " Johnson would have awed him, he treated 
lords with so much respect." The reader, after what I have 
lately said, will see what was at the bottom of these remarks 
on both sides. Had the question been asked me now, I should 



314 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

have said, that I loved Johnson, and hope I should have 
shown him all due homage ; though I think I should have 
been inclined sometimes to contest his conclusions more than 
they are contested by his interlocutors in Boswell. Lord 
Byron liked to imitate Johnson, and say, " Why, sir," in a 
high mouthing way, rising, and looking about him. His 
imitation was very pleasant. 

It is a credit to my noble friend, that he was by far the 
pleasantest when he had got a little wine in his head. The 
only time I invited myself to dine with him, I told him I did 
it on that account, and that I meant to push the bottle so that 
he should intoxicate me with his good company. He said he 
would have a set-to ; but he never did. It was a little before 
he left Italy ; and there was a point in contest between us 
(not regarding myself) which he thought perhaps I should 
persuade him to give up. When in his cups, which was not 
often nor immoderately, he was inclined to be tender ; but 
not weakly so, nor lachrymose. I know not how it might 
have been with everybody, but he paid me the compliment of 
being excited to his very best feelings ; and when I rose late 
to go away, he would hold me down, and say with a look of 
entreaty, " JNot yet." Then it was that I seemed to talk with 
the proper natural Byron as he ought to have been ; and I 
used to think there was not a sacrifice which I could not have 
made to keep him in that temper, and see his friends love him 
as much as the world admired. But I ought to have made 
the sacrifice at once. I should have broken the ice between 
us which had been generated on points of literary predilec- 
tion ; and admired, and shown that I admired, as I ought to 
have done, his admirable genius. It was not only an overr- 
sight in me ; it was a want of friendship. Friendship ought 
to have made me discover what less cordial feelings had kept 
me blind to. Next morning the happy moment had gone, 
and nothing remained but to despair and joke. 

In his wine he would volunteer an imitation of somebody, 
generally of Incledon. He was not a good mimic in the de- 
tail, but he could give a lively broad sketch ; and over his 
cups his imitations were good-natured, which was not always 
the case at other times. His Incledon was vocal. I made 
pretensions to the oratorical part ; and between us we boasted 
that we made up the entire phenomenon. He would some- 
times, however, give a happy comprehensive idea of a per- 
son's manner and turn of mind by the utterance of a single 



GENOA. 315 

phrase, or even word. Thus he would pleasantly pretend 
that Braham called " enthusiasm " entoozymoozy ; and in the 
extraordinary combination of lightness, haste, indifference, 
and fervour with which he would pitch out that single word 
from his lips, accompanied with a gesture to correspond, he 
would really set before you the admirable singer in one of his 
(then) characteristic passages of stage dialogue. He did not 
live to see Braham become an exception in his dialogue as in 
his singing. 

Lord Byron left Italy for Greece, and our conversation was 
at an end. I will, therefore, request the reader's company in 
a walk with me about Genoa. 

Genoa is truly " Genoa the Superb." Its finest aspect is 
from the sea, and from the sea I first beheld it. Imagine a 
glorious amphitheatre of white houses, with mountains on 
each side and at the back. The base is composed of the city 
with its chinches and shipping ; the other houses are country 
seats, looking out, one above the other, up the hill. h To the 
left are the Alps with their snowy tops : to the right, and for 
the back, are the Apennines. This is Genoa. It is situate at 
the very angle of the pointed gulf, which is called after its 
name, and which presents on either side, as you sail up it, 
white villages, country seats, and olive groves. 

When we first saw Genoa, which was the first Italian city 
we beheld, our notions of the Italian countenance were for- 
midably startled by the pilot-boat, which came out to offer 
its assistance in conducting us by the mole. The mole had 
been injured greatly by the storms of the preceding winter. 
The boat contained, I thought, as ugly a set of faces as could 
well have been brought together. It was a very neat boat, 
and the pilots were singularly neat and clean in their persons ; 
but their faces ! My wife looked at me as much as to say, 
" Are these our fine southern heads?" The children looked 
at me : we all looked at one another : and what was very in- 
hospitable, the pilots all looked at us. The sun was in their 
eyes; and there they sat on their oars, grinning up at us, and 
bargaining with the captain. The older ones were like 
monkeys; the younger like half- withered masks — hard, 
stony, and pale. 

The first sight of Italian women disappointed us almost as 
much as Italian men, because we expected still more of them. 
Of course, had we seen them first, they would have disap- 
pointed us more. But I afterwards found, that as you ascended 



316 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

among the more educated classes, the faces improved; and I 
have reason to believe, that most of the women whom we saw 
in boats, deceived us as to their rank in this respect. In 
Italy, gentlemen do not look so much like gentlemen as in 
England, but there are greater numbers of women who look 
like ladies. This is partly owing to their dress. In Genoa 
particularly, the out-of-door head-dress for women of all 
ranks is a white veil ; and an Englishman, unaccustomed to 
see this piece of drapery upon common heads, and observing, 
besides, the stateliness with which female Italians carry them- 
selves, thinks he is oftener looking at gentlewomen than he is. 

"We had not been long in harbour before we inquired, with 
all the eagerness of voyagers, for our fresh provisions. In 
Italy, we also looked for our fresh heaps of fruit; and we had 
them — in all the luxury of baskets and vine-leaves, and a 
cheapness that made us laugh. Grapes were not in season; 
but there were figs, apricots, fresh almonds, oranges, pears, 
and gigantic cherries, as fine as they were large. We also 
took leave of our biscuit for excellent bread; and had milk 
brought to us in bottles, which were stopped with vine-leaves. 
The mutton turned out to be kid, and lean enough; but it 
was a novelty, and we ate it upon a principle of .inquiry. 
An excellent light wine accompanied our repast, drunk, not 
in little cautious glasses, like our " hot intoxicating liquor," 
but out of tumblers. It was just threepence English a quart. 
It had, notwithstanding its lightness, a real vinous body, and 
both looked and tasted like a sort of claret ; but we were 
sorry to find it was French, and not Italian. As to the fruit, — 
to give a specimen in one word, — the apricots, very fine ones, 
were twopence a gallon. 

The quay of Genoa is a handsome one, profuse of good 
pavement, gate ? &c. ; and the abundance of stone everywhere, 
the whiteness of the houses, and the blueness of the sky, cast, 
at first sight, an extraordinary look of lightness and cleanli- 
ness upon everything. Nor are you disappointed in Genoa, 
as people are at Lisbon, between the fairness of the look out- 
side and the dirt within. The large wrinkled features of the 
old women, with their uncapped gray hair, strike you at first 
as singularly plain: so do the people in general: but every- 
thing looks clean and neat, and full of the smart bustle of a 
commercial city. What surprises you is the narrowness of 
the streets. As soon as you have passed the gate, you think 
you have entered upon a lane, remarkably good indeed for a 



GENOA. 317 

lane, — a sort of Bond Street of an alley, — but you have no 
suspicion that it is a street, and of the ordinary dimensions. 
The shops also, though neat, are entirely open, like English 
potato shops, or at best like some of the little comb shops now 
rarely to be seen in London. I mean, they have no windows, 
or such walls as would hold them. After entering this street, 
you soon come upon the public place, or exchange, which is a 
very fair one. You cross over this into the principal street, 
or street of goldsmiths, full of shops in which trinkets are 
sold, including a world of crosses and other Christian emblems, 
and huge ear-rings. It is the custom in several parts of Italy 
for girls to carry their marriage portion about with them, in 
the shape of gold ear-rings and crosses; and no maid-servant 
thinks herself properly dressed on mass-days without an- 
nouncing, in this way, that she is equally fit for heaven and a 
husband. The gold is very thin, but solidity is made up for 
by the length and width of the ornaments ; and the ear-rings 
are often heavy enough to tear through the lobes of the ears. 
Imagine a brown, black-eyed girl, with her thick hair done 
up in combs, a white veil over it, a coloured, sometimes a 
white gown, large dangling gold ornaments at her ears and 
bosom, and perhaps bare feet or tattered shoes, and you have 
the complete portrait of a Genoese .maid-servant or peasant 
girl, issuing forth to church or to a dance. The men of all 
classes dress more like the same classes in other countries, 
with an exception, however, as before noticed, in favour of 
the humbler ones. Yet you often see the old Genoese cap, 
and you notice a set of porters from Bergamo, who wear a 
puckered kilt. They are a good-looking race, and are esteemed 
for their honesty. The burdens they carry are enormous. 
The labourer of Italy often shows his propensity to a piece of 
drapery, by hanging his jacket over his shoulders with the 
sleeves dangling; a custom naturally prompted by the heat. 

In England we have delicate names for some of our streets 
and alleys. There is Love Lane, Maiden Lane, Garden Court, 
Green Arbour Court, &c, but in Italy they beat us hollow. 
Pisa has not only Love Street and Lily Street, but Beautiful 
Ladies' Lane, and the Lane of the Beautiful Towers. In 
Genoa, after passing through Goldshiith Street, and another 
that leads up from it, you came out by the post-office upon 
the Piazza delle Fontane Amorose, — the Place of the Amorous 
Fountains. There is a magnificent mansion in it, containing 
baths ; and another, adorned on the outside with paintings of 



318 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

festive women. But here all the houses begin to be magnifi- 
cent mansions, and you again recognise " Genova la Superba." 
From the Piazza delle Fontane Amorose you turn into the 
Strada Nuova, which leads round through another sumptuous 
street into the Strada Balbi, fit, says Madame de Stael, for a 
congress of kings. The three streets are literally a succession 
of palaces on each side of the way; and these palaces are of 
costly architecture, and are adorned inside with the works 
of the Italian masters. Marble is lavished everywhere. It 
is like a street raised by Aladdin, to astonish his father-in- 
law, the Sultan. Yet there is one lamentable deficiency. 
Even these streets are narrow. I do not think the Strada 
Nuova is wider than Bond Street ivithout the pavements. " A 
]ane ! " you cry. Yes, a lane of Whitehalls, encrusted with 
the richest architecture. Imagine how much, the buildings 
lose by this confi Dement, and then wonder how it could have 
taken place. The alleged reason is, that in a hot country 
shade is wanted, and therefore beauty is sacrificed to utility. 
But the reason is a bad one: for porticos might have been 
used, as at Bologna, and the street made so wide as to render 
the disadvantage to the architecture a comparative nothing. 
The circumstance probably originated in some reasons con- 
nected with the ground, or the value of it, and the pressure 
of the population within the then city walls. Some other 
magnificent streets, built subsequently, are wider, though still 
a good deal too narrow. The Genoese have found out, before 
ourselves, the folly of calling a street New Street ; but they 
have not very wisely corrected it by naming one of their last, 
Newest Street, — Strada Nuovissima. Upon this principle, 
they must call the next street they build, Newer-than-all- 
street, or Extremely-new-street, or New-of-the-very-newest- 
description-street. They seem to have no idea of calling 
their streets, as we do, after the names of obscure builders 
and proprietors ; a very dull custom, and idle piece of vanity ; 
especially in a country which abounds in great names. The 
streets of a metropolis ought to exhaust the whole nomen- 
clature of great men, national or otherwise, before it begins 
with bricklayers. Nay, it would be handsome to see the 
names of illustrious foreigners mingled with those of the 
nation; and I have no doubt, that as nations become fused 
together by intercourse, such compliments will take place. 
They will be regarded, indeed, as discharges of debts : for who 
does not feel grateful to the wise and good of all countries ? 



GEXOA. 319 

In Genoa I first had the pleasure of seeing a religious pro- 
cession. I found chairs brought out in one of the streets, 
and well-dressed company seated on each side, as in a music - 
room. In Genoa, some of the streets are paved all over. In 
the rest, the flat pavement is in the middle, and used both for 
traffic and walking. This, I suppose, originated in a vile 
custom which they have in several cities of Italy, — the same 
which Smollett speaks of in the Edinburgh of his time. Acci- 
dents frequently occur in consequence ; but anything is sooner 
mended than a habit originating in idleness or moral indiffer- 
ence; and the inhabitants and the mules go on in their old 
way. But to return to the procession. — The reader must 
imagine a narrow street, with the company as above men- 
tioned, and an avenue left for the passage of the spectacle. 
The curiosity expressed in the company's faces was of a very 
mild description, the next thing to indifference. The music 
was heard at a little distance, then came a bustling sound of 
feet, and you saw the friars advancing. Nearly at the head 
of the procession was a little live Virgin, about four years 
old, walking in much state, with a silver-looking crown on her 
head, and a sceptre in her hand. A pleased relation helped 
her along, occasionally righting the crown and sceptre, which 
she bore with all that dignified gravity which children so soon 
imitate. By her side w r as another grown person, equally 
pleased, supporting a still smaller St. John, dressed in a lamb- 
skin, and apparently selected for his office on account of his 
red little waxen cheeks and curly flaxen hair. He did not 
seem quite as much cm fait in the matter as the Virgin, but 
was as grave as need be, and not a little heated. A string of 
clergy followed in their gowns, carrying large lighted wax 
candles, and each one assisted by a personage whose appear- 
ance was singularly striking to a foreigner from a Protestant 
country. 

These coadjutors were neither more nor less than the very 
raggedest and dirtiest fellows, old and young, in all Genoa. 
There w T as one to every light. His object was to collect the 
wax that fell from the candles, which he did in a piece of 
paper ; and the candle seemed to be made to gutter on pur- 
pose, in order to oblige him with as much of it as possible. 
The wax is sold by the gainer. I dare say this accompani- 
ment of pauperism has a reference to the best doctrines of 
the Christian religion ; but it is a singular mistake, and has 
a most unedifying appearance. Poverty should not be in this 



320 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

squalid condition, especially by the side of comfortable clergy- 
men. The faces, too, of the poor fellows had, for the most 
part, all the signs of bad education. Now and then there was 
a head like the beggar who sat for Sir Joshua's Ugolino,— a 
fine head, but still a beggar. Some were of a portentous 
raffishness. 

As to the priests and friars (for there followed a variety), I 
could not help observing, that, with very few exceptions, the 
countenances grew indifferent and worldly as they grew old. 
A few of the young ones were worthy of the heads in Eaphael. 
One young man had a saint-like manner with him, casting- 
down his eyes, and appearing absorbed in meditation ; but I 
thought, when he did cast them up (which he instantly fol- 
lowed by casting them down again), it was in approaching the 
young ladies. He had certainly a head fit for an Abelard. 

I spoke just now of a bustle of feet. You do not know at 
first to what the loudness of it is owing, but the secret is 
explained as a large machine approaches, preceded by music. 
This is a group of wax- work as large as life, carried on the 
shoulders of ambhng friars; for they are obliged to shuffle 
into that step on account of the weight. It represented, on 
the present occasion, St. Antonio kneeling before the Virgin, 
around whom were little angels fluttering like Cupids. It is 
impossible not to be reminded of Paganism by these spec- 
tacles. Indeed, as the Jupiter of the Capitol still sits there 
under his new name of St. Peter, so there is no doubt that 
the ancients, under other names, had these identical proces- 
sions. The Cupids remain unaltered. The son of Myrrha 
himself could not look more lover-like than Sant' Antonio, 
nor Venus more polite than the Virgin ; and the flowers stuck 
all about (the favourite emblem of the Cyprian youth), com- 
pleted the likeness to an ancient festival of Adonis. So also 
would the priests have looked in their ancient garments ; so 
would have come the music and the torches (paupers excepted) ; 
and so w r ould the young priests have looked, in passing by the 
young ladies. To see the grandeurs of the Catholic religion, 
you must consult its rarest and most serious festivals, its 
pictures, and its poet Dante. I must not forget, that among 
the musical instruments were violins. One set of friars wore 
cowls over their faces, having holes only to see through, and 
looking extremely hideous, — like executioners. Or were they 
brethren of the benevolent order of the Misericordia, who 
disguise themselves, only the more nobly to attend to any 



GENOA. 321 

disaster that calls upon them for aid ? If so, observe how 
people may be calumniated merely in consequence of a spec- 
tator's ignorance. Among the persons who showed their faces, 
and who did not seem at all ashamed of them, was one good- 
natured, active individual, who ran back, with great vivacity, 
to encourage the machine-bearers. He looked as much as to 
say, "It is hot enough for you, Heaven knows!" and so 
it was. 

Somebody has said, that in the south all the monks look 
like soldiers, and all the soldiers like monks. I dare say this 
might have been the case before the spread of liberal opinions; 
but it is so no longer. In Spain and Portugal it cannot be so ; 
though the troops quartered in Genoa were for the most part 
under-grown and poor-looking men. The officers, however, 
were better. They had a propensity, common, I am told, in 
the south, to overgrown caps and epaulets ; but they had 
otherwise a manly aspect, and looked more like gentlemen 
than any one else. This, indeed, is always the case where 
there is any difference — military habits begetting an air of 
self-possession. The Genoese soldiery were remarkably well- 
dressed. They had a bad way of learning their exercise. 
They accompanied every motion — the whole set of men — 
with a loud Ho! just as if a multitude of quick paviors 
were at work. This, besides encouraging noise, must take 
away from a ready dependence on the eye. 

I used often to go to the churches in Genoa and elsewhere. 
I liked their quiet, their coolness, and their richness. Besides, 
I find my own religion in some part or other of all imagina- 
tive religions. In one of the churches are pillars of porphyry, 
and several are very imposing ; but they struck me upon the 
whole as exhibiting the genius of a commercial rather than a 
tasteful country; as being more weighty and expensive than 
beautiful. There are some good pictures ; but by far the 
greater number adorn the houses of the nobility. In all 
Catholic churches, there is an unfortunate mixture of petty 
ornaments with great, of dusty artificial flowers with fine altar- 
pieces, and of wretched little votive pictures, and silver hearts 
and legs, stuck up by the side of the noblest pieces of art. 

This is another custom handed down from antiquity. I 
was reminded of Horace's Ode to Pyrrha, by a painting of a 
shipwreck, in which the wind blew one way and the sails 
another. If a man has got rid of a pain in the pericardium, 
he dedicates a little silver heart to the saint whose assistance 

21 



322 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH SUNT. 

he prayed for. If a toe has been the complaining part, he 
hangs up a toe. The general feeling is good, but not so the 
detail. It is affecting, however, to think that many of the 
hearts hung up (and they are by far the most numerous) have 
been owing to pangs of the spirit. 

The most interesting thing I met with in the Genoese 
churches, next to a picture by Eaphael and Giulio Romano 
in that of St. Stephen, was a sermon by a friar on Weeping. 
He seemed a popular preacher, and held the attention of his 
audience for a good hour. His exordium was in a gentle and 
restrained voice, but he warmed as he went on, and became 
as loud and authoritative as the tenderness of his subject 
could well permit. He gave us an account of all sorts of 
tears — of the tears of joy and the tears of sorrow, of penitent 
tears, tears of anger, spite, ill-temper, worldly regret, love, 
patience, &c. ; and from what I could collect, with an ear 
unaccustomed to hear Italian spoken, a very true, as well as 
full and particular account it was. The style was more florid 
than in our northern sermons. He spoke of murmuring rills 
and warbling nightingales, and admitted all the merits of 
poetical luxury ; but in denouncing luxury in general, it was 
curious to hear a stout, jovial-looking friar exhorting his 
auditors to value above all other enjoyments that of weeping 
in solitude. The natives are not likely to be too much 
softened by injunctions of this description. 

The houses in Genoa are very high as well as large. Many 
of them are painted on the outside, not only with pictures, 
but with imitations of architecture ; and whatever we may 
think of such a taste, these displays must have looked magni- 
ficent when the paintings were first executed. Some of them 
look so now; colours in this beautiful climate retaining their 
vividness for centuries out of doors. But in some instances, 
the paintings being done upon stucco, the latter has partly 
crumbled away, and this gives a shabby, dilapidated appear- 
ance to houses otherwise excellent. Nobody seems to think 
of repairing them. It is the same with many of the houses 
unpainted, and with common garden walls, most of which 
must have once made a splendid appearance. The mere spirit 
of commerce has long succeeded to its ancient inclusion of a 
better one ; or Genoa would not be what it is in many respects. 
But a Genoese must nevertheless have grand notions of houses : 
especially as in this city, as well as the rest of Italy, shop- 
keepers sometimes occupy the ground floors of the finesl 



GENOA. 823 

mansions. You shall see a blacksmith or a carpenter looking 
out of a window where you might expect a duchess. 

Neither Genoa nor even the country around it abounds in 
trees. It is a splendid sea-port of stone and marble, and the 
mountains in the- neighbourhood are barren, though they soon 
begin to be clothed with olive-trees. But among the gigantic 
houses and stone walls you now and then detect a garden, 
with its statues and orange-trees ; some of the windows have 
vines trailed over them, not in the scanty fashion of our 
creepers, but like great luxuriant green hair hanging over 
the houses' eyes ; and sometimes the very highest stories have 
a terrace along the whole length of the house embowered with 
them. Calling one day upon a gentleman who resided in an 
elevated part of the suburbs, and to get at whose abode I had 
walked through a hot sun and a city of stone, I was agreeably 
surprised, when the door opened, with a long yellow vista of 
an arcade of vines, at once basking in the sun and defending 
from it. In the suburbs there are some orchards in all the 
southern luxuriance of leaves and fruit. In one of these, I 
walked among heaps of vines, olives, cherry, orange, and 
almond-trees, and had the pleasure of plucking fresh lemons 
from the bough, a merry old brown gardener, with a great 
straw hat and bare legs, admiring all the while my regard for 
those commonplaces, and encouraging me with a good-natured 
paternity to do what I pleased. The cherries were Brobdig- 
nagian, and bursting with juice. Next the orchard was a 
icine-garden, answering to our tea-gardens, with vine-arbours 
and seats as with us, where people drink wine and play at 
their games. Returning through the city, I saw a man in one 
of the bye-streets alternately singing and playing on a pipe, 
exactly as we conceive of the ancient shepherds. 

One night I went to the opera, which was indifferent 
enough, but I understand it is a good deal better sometimes. 
The favourite composer here and all over Italy, is Rossini, a 
truly national genius, full of the finest animal spirits, yet 
capable of the noblest gravity. My northern faculties were 
scandalized at seeing men in the pit with fans! Effeminacy is 
not always incompatible with courage, but it is a very danger- 
ous help towards it ; and I wondered what Doria would have 
said had he seen a captain of one of his galleys indulging his 
cheeks in this manner. Yet perhaps they did so in his own 
times. What would be effeminate in a man of the north, 
unaccustomed to it, may be a harmless trifle to a southern. 

21—2 



324 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

One night, on our first arrival in Genoa, the city was 
illuminated, and bonfires and rockets put in motion, in honour 
of St. John the Baptist. The effect from the harbour was 
beautiful ; fire, like the stars, having a brilliancy in this pure 
atmosphere, of which we have no conception. The scent of 
the perfumes employed in the bonfires was very perceptible 
on board ship. 

You learn for the first time in this climate, what colours 
really are. No wonder it produces painters. An English 
artist of any enthusiasm might shed tears of vexation, to think 
of the dull medium through which blue and red come to him 
in his own atmosphere, compared with this. One day we saw 
a boat pass us, which instantly reminded us of Titian, and 
accounted for him: and yet it contained nothing but an old 
boatman in a red cap, and some women with him in other 
colours, one of them in a bright yellow petticoat. But a red 
cap in Italy goes by you, not like a mere cap, much less any- 
thing vulgar or butcher -like, but like what it is, an intense 
specimen of the colour of red. It is like a scarlet bud in the 
blue atmosphere. The old boatman, with his brown hue, his 
white shirt, and his red cap, made a complete picture; and so 
did the women and the yellow petticoat. I have seen pieces 
of orange-coloured silk hanging out against a wall at a dyer's, 
which gave the eye a pleasure truly sensual. Some of these 
boatmen are very fine men. I was rowed to shore one day by 
a man the very image of Kemble. He had nothing but his 
shirt on, and it was really grand to see the mixed power and 
gracefulness with which all his limbs came into play as he 
pulled the oars, occasionally turning his heroic profile to give 
a glance behind him at other boats. They generally row 
standing, and pushing from them. 

The most interesting sight, after all, in Genoa, was the one 
we first saw — the Doria palace. Bonaparte lodged there when 
he was in Genoa; but this, which would have been one of its 
greatest praises, had he done all he could for liberty, is one 
of its least. Andrew Doria dwelt there after a long life, 
which he spent in giving security and glory to his country, 
and which he crowned by his refusal of power. " I know the 
value," said he, " of the liberty I have earned for my country, 
and shall I finish by taking it from her?" When upwards 
of eighty, he came forward and took the command of an 
armament in a rough season. His friends remonstrated. 
"Excuse me," said he; "I have never yet stopped for any- 



GENOA. 325 

thing when my duty was in the way, and at my time of life 
one cannot get rid of one's old habits." This is the very 
perfection of a speech — a mixture of warrantable self-esteem, 
modesty, energy, pathos, and pleasantry ; for it contains them 
all. He died upwards of ninety. 

I asked for Doria's descendants, and was told they were 
rich. The Pallavicini, with whom the Cromwell family were 
connected, are extant. I could ascertain nothing more of the 
other old families, except that they had acquired a considera- 
ble dislike of the English ; which, under all circumstances at 
that time, was in their favour. I found one thing, however, 
which they did; and I must correct, in favour of this one 
thing, what I have said about the Doria palace ; for the sight 
of it upon the whole gave me still greater satisfaction. This 
was, the overthrow of the Genoese Inquisition. There was a 
wish to rebuild it ; but this the old families opposed ; and the 
last ruins of it were being cleared away. It was pleasant to 
see the workmen crashing its old marble jaws. 

Genoa has shown how much and how little can be done by 
mere commerce. A great man here and there in former timek 
is an exception ; and the princely mansions, the foundations 
of schools and hospitals, and the erection of costly churches, 
attest that in similar periods money-getting had not degene- 
rated into miserliness. But the Genoese did not cultivate 
mind enough to keep up the breed of patriots ; and it remained 
for an indignant spirit to issue out of a neighbouring arbitrary 
monarchy and read them lectures on their absorption in money- 
getting. Alfieri, in his Satire on Commerce, ranks them with 
their mules. It avails nothing to a people to be merely 
acquiring money, while the rest of the world are acquiring 
ideas ; — a truth which England has gloriously understood, 
and, it is to be trusted, will still more gloriously illustrate. 
It turns out, that Genoa and its neighbourhood have no pre- 
tensions to Columbus ; which is lucky for her. He was born 
at Cuccaro, in the province of Aqui, not far from Asti — 
Alfleri's birth-place. Chiabrera, who is sometimes called the 
Italian Pindar, was born near Genoa, at Savona. I have read 
little of him; but he must have merit to be counted an 
Italian classic ; and it says little for the Genoese, that I could 
not find a copy of his works at their principal bookseller's. 
I have since become better acquainted with him. He was a 
bigot in his religion, and of so violent a temper, as to have 
been guilty, twice over, of what he calls manslaughter in self- 



326 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

vindication : yet lie had not only force and expression in his 
graver lyrics, but a light and gay turn for Anacreontics. He 
tried to introduce a Greek turn of writing into the language, 
especially in compound words ; but the practice did not obtain. 
Frugoni, their other poet, was born, I believe, in the same 
place. He is easy and lively, but wrote a great deal too 
much, probably for bread. There is a pleasant petition of his 
in verse to the Genoese senate, about some family claims, in 
which he gives an account of his debts that must have startled 
the faculties of that prudent and opulent body. A few more 
irugonis, however, and a few less rich men, would have been 
better for Genoa. The best production I ever met with from 
a Genoese pen, is a noble sonnet by Giambattista Pastorini, a 
Jesuit; written after the bombardment of the city by the 
troops of Louis XIV. The poet glories in the resistance made 
by Genoa, and kisses the ruins caused by the bombardment 
with transport. What must have been his mortification, when 
he saw the Doge and a number of senators set out for France, 
to go and apologize to Louis XIV. for having been so erroneous 
as to defend their country ! 

There is a proverb which says of Genoa, that it has a sea 
without fish, land without trees, men without faith, and women 
without modesty. Ligurian trickery is a charge as old as 
Virgil. But M. Millin very properly observes (Voyage en 
Savoie, &c.) that accusations of this description are generally 
made by jealous neighbours, and that the Genoese have most 
likely no more want of good faith than other Italians who 
keep shops. I must confess, at the same time, that the most 
barefaced trick ever attempted to be practised on myself, was 
by a Genoese. The sea, it is said, has plenty of fish, only 
the duty on it is very high, and the people prefer butchers' 
meat. This is hardly a good reason why fish is not eaten at 
a seaport. Perhaps it is naturally scarce at the extreme point 
of a gulf like that of Genoa. The land is naked enough, 
certainly, in the immediate vicinity, though it soon begins to 
be otherwise. As to the women, they have fine eyes and 
figures, but by no means appear destitute of modesty ; and 
modesty has much to do with appearance. Wholesale charges 
of want of modesty are, at all times and in all places, most 
likely to be made by those who have no modesty themselves. 

The Governor of Genoa, at that time, was a Savoyard 
Marquis of the name of D'Yennes, and he is said to have 
related with much glee a current anecdote about himself. 



FLORENCE : ITALY IX GENERAL. 327 

As he was coming to take possession of his appointment, lie 
stopped at a town not far from Genoa, the inhabitants of 
which were ambitious of doing him honour. They accord- 
ingly gave him an entertainment, at which was an allegorical 
picture containing a hyaena surrounded with Cupids. The 
hyaena was supposed to be a translation of his name. Upon 
requesting an explanation of the compliment, he received the 
following smiling reply : — " Les Amours, Monsieur, sont nous : 
et vous etes la bete.''' (" The loves, sir, are ourselves: the 
beast is you.") 



CHAPTER XXL 



FLORENCE— BACCHUS IN TUSCANY — THE VENUS DE' MEDICI 
— AND ITALY IN GENERAL. 

Resolving to remain a while in Italy, though not in Genoa, 
we took our departure from that city in the summer of the 
year 1823, and returned into Tuscany in order to live at 
Florence. We liked Genoa on some accounts, and none the 
less for having a son born there, who, from that hour to this, 
has been a comfort to us.* But in Florence there were more 
conveniences for us, more books, more fine arts, more illus- 
trious memories, and a greater concourse of Englishmen ; so 
that we might possess, as it were, Italy and England together. 
In Genoa we no longer possessed a companion of our own 
country ; for Mrs. Shelley had gone to England ; and we felt 
strange enough at first, thus seeking a home by ourselves in a 
foreign land. 

Unfortunately, in the first instance, the movement did us 
no good ; for it was the height of summer when we set cut, 
and in Italy this is not the time for being in motion. The 
children, however, living temperately, and not yet being- 
liable to cares which temperance could not remove, soon re- 
covered. It was otherwise with the parents ; but there is a 
habit in being ill, as in everything else ; and we disposed 
ourselves to go through our task of endurance as cheerfully as 
might be. 

In Genoa you heard nothing in the streets but the talk of 
money. I hailed it as a good omen in Florence, that the 

* This was written in the year 1849, and held good till the year 
1852, when, alas 1 he died. 



828 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HOTT. 

first two words which caught my ears were flowers and 
women (Fiori and Donne). The night of our arrival we put 
up at an hotel in a very public street, and were kept awake (as 
agreeably as illness would let us be) by songs and guitars. 
It was one of our pleasantest experiences of the south; and, 
for the moment, w^e lived in the Italy of books. One per- 
former to a jovial accompaniment sang a song about some- 
body's fair wife, which set the street in roars of laughter. 

From the hotel we went to a lodging in the street of 
Beautiful Women — Via delle Belle Donne — a name which it 
is a sort of tune to pronounce. We there heard one night 
a concert in the street; and looking out, saw music-stands, 
books, &c. in regular order, and amateurs performing as in a 
room. Opposite our lodgings w r as an inscription on a house, 
purporting that it was the hospital of the Monks of Val- 
lombrosa. Wherever you turned was music or a graceful 
memory. 

From the Via delle Belle Donne we went to live in the Piazza 
Santa Croce, in a corner house on the left side of it, near to 
the church of that name, Avhich contains the ashes of Galileo, 
Michael Angelo, Boccaccio, Macchiavelli, Alfieri, and others. 
Englishmen call it the Florentine Westminster Abbey, but it 
has not the venerable look of the Abbey, nor, indeed, any 
resemblance at all — but that of a building half finished ; 
though it is several hundred years old. There are so many 
of these unfinished old edifices in Florence, owing to decline 
in the funds left for their completion, that they form a pecu- 
liar feature in this Otherwise beautiful city, and a whole 
volume has been devoted to the subject. On the other side 
of this sepulchre of great men is the monastery in which 
Pope Sixtus the Fifth went stooping as if in decrepitude — 
61 looking," as he said afterwards, " for the keys of St. Peter." 
We lodged in the house of a Greek, who came from the island 
of Andros, and was called Dionysius ; a name which has 
existed there, perhaps, ever since the god who bore it. Our 
host was a proper Bacchanalian, always drunk, and spoke 
faster than I ever heard. He had a " fair Andrian " for his 
mother, old and ugly, whose name was Bella. 

The church of Santa Croce would disappoint you as much 
inside as out, if the presence of the remains of great men did 
not always cast a mingled shadow of the awful and beautiful 
over one's thoughts. Any large space, also, devoted to the 
purposes of religion disposes the mind to the loftiest of specu- 



FLORENCE : ITALY IN GENERAL. 329 

lations. The vaulted sky out of doors appears small, com- 
pared with the opening into immensity represented by that 
very enclosure — that larger dwelling than common, entered 
by a little door. The door is like a grave, and the enclosure 
like a vestibule of heaven. 

Agreeably to our old rustic propensities, we did not stop 
long in the city. We left Santa Croce to live at Maiano, a 
village on the slope of one of the Fiesolan hills, about two 
miles off. It gives its name to one of the earliest of the 
Italian poets, precursor of the greater Dante, called Dante of 
Maiano. He had a namesake living on the spot, in the per- 
son of a little boy — a terrible rover out of bounds, whom his 
parents were always shouting for with the apostrophe of 
" O Dante!" He excelled in tearing his clothes and getting 
a dirty face and hands. I heard his mother one evening 
hail his return home with the following welcome : — " O 
Dante, what a brute beast you are ! " I thought how pro- 
bable it was, that the Florentine adversaries of the great 
poet, his namesake, would have addressed their abuser in 
precisely the same terms, after reading one of his infernal 
flayings of them in the* Lakes of Tartarus. Dante and Alfieri 
were great favourites with a Hebrew family (jewellers, if I 
remember), who occupied the ground-floor of the house we 
lived in, the Villa Morandi, and who partook the love of 
music in common with their tribe. Their little girls de- 
claimed out of Alfieri in the morning, and the parents led 
concerts in the garden of an evening. They were an inter- 
esting set of people, with marked characters ; and took 
heartily to some specimens which I endeavoured to give 
them of the genius of Shakspeare. They had a French 
governess, who, though a remarkably good speaker of English 
in general, told me one day, in eulogizing the performance of 
one of the gentlemen who was a player on the bassoon, that 
" his excellence lay in the bason.' 1 '' It was the grandfather of 
this family whom I have described in another "work (Men, 
Women, and Books), as hailed one May morning by the 
assembled merry-makers of the hamlet, in verses which 
implied that he was the efficient cause of the exuberance of 
the season. 

The manners of this hamlet were very pleasant and cheer- 
ful. The priest used to come of an evening, and take a 
Christian game at cards with his Hebrew friends. A young 
Abate would dance round a well with the daughters of the 



330 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

vine -growers, the whole party singing as they footed. I re- 
member the burden of one of the songs — 

" Ne di giorno, ne di sera, 
Non passiamo la selva nera." 
(Night and morn be it understood, 
Nobody passes the darksome wood.) 

One evening all the young peasantry in the neighbourhood 
assembled in the hall of the village, by leave of the proprietor 
(an old custom), and had the most energetic ball I ever beheld. 
The walls of the room seemed to spin round with the waltz, 
as though it would never leave off — the whirling faces all 
looking grave, hot, and astonished at one another. Among 
the musicians I observed one of the apprentices of my friend 
the bookseller, an evidence of a twofold mode of getting 
money not unknown in England. I recollected his face the 
more promptly, inasmuch as not many days previous he had 
accompanied me to my abode with a set of books, and 
astonished me by jumping on a sudden from one side of 
me to the other. I asked what was the matter, and he 
said, " A viper, sir" (una vipera, signore). He seemed to think 
that an Englishman might as well settle the viper as the bill. 

Notwithstanding these amusements at Maiano, I passed a 
very disconsolate time ; yet the greatest comfort I experienced 
in Italy (next to writing a book which I shall mention) was 
living in that neighbourhood, and thinking, as I went about, 
of Boccaccio. Boccaccio's father had a house at Maiano, sup- 
posed to have been situated at the Fiesolan extremity of the 
hamlet. That many-hearted writer (whose sentiment out- 
weighed his levity a hundredfold, as a fine face is oftener 
serious than it is merry) was so fond of the place, that he has 
not only laid the two scenes of the Decameron on each side of 
it, with the valley which his company resorted to in the 
middle, but has made the two little streams that embrace 
Maiano, the Affrico and the Mensola, the hero and heroine 
of his Nimphale Fiesolano. A lover and his mistress are 
changed into them, after the fashion of Ovid. The scene of 
another of his works is on the banks of the Mugnone, a river 
a little distant ; and the Decameron is full of the neighbouring 
villages. Out of the windows of one side of our house we 
saw the turret of the Villa Gherardi, to which, according to 
his biographers, his " joyous company" resorted in the first 
instance. A house belonging to the Macchiavelli was nearer, 
a little to the left; and farther to the left, among the blue 



FLORENCE: ITALY IX GENERAL. 831 

hills, was the white village of Settignano, where Michael 
Angelo was born. The house is still in possession of the 
family. From our windows on the other side we saw, close 
to us, the Fiesole of antiquity and of Milton, the site of the 
Boccaccio-house before mentioned still closer, the Decameron's 
Valley of Ladies at our feet ; and we looked over towards the 
quarter of the Mugnone and of a house of Dante, and in the 
distance beheld the mountains of Pistoia. Lastly, from the 
terrace in front, Florence lay clear and cathedralled before us, 
with the scene of Redi's Bacchus rising on the other side of it, 
and the Villa of Arcetri, illustrious for Galileo. Hazlitt, who 
came to see me there (and who afterwards, with one of his 
felicitous images, described the state of mind in which he 
found me, by saying that I was " moulting"), beheld the scene 
around us with the admiration natural to a lover of old folios 
and great names, and confessed, in the language of Burns, 
that it was a sight to enrich the eyes. 

But I stuck to my Boccaccio haunts, as to an old home. I 
lived with the true human being, with his friends of the 
Falcon and the Basil, and my own not unworthy melancholy ; 
and went about the flowering lanes and hills, solitary indeed, 
and sick to the heart, but not unsustained. In looking back 
to such periods of one's existence, one is surprised to find how 
much they surpass many seasons of mirth, and what a rich 
tone of colour their very darkness assumes, as in some fine old 
painting. My almost daily walk was to Fiesole, through a 
path skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen ; and I stopped at 
the cloister of the Doccia, and sat on the pretty melancholy 
platform behind it, reading or looking through the pines down 
to Florence. In the Valley of Ladies I found some English 
trees (trees, not vine and olive), and even a meadow ; and 
these, while I made them furnish me with a bit of my old 
home in the north, did no injury to the memory of Boccaccio, 
who is of all countries, and who finds his home wherever we 
do ourselves, in love, in the grave, in a desert island. 

But I had other friends, too, not far off, English, and of the 
right sort. My friend, Charles Armitage Brown (Keats's 
friend, and the best commentator on Shakspeare s Sonnets), 
occupied for a time the little convent of San Baldassare, near 
Maiano, where he represented the body corporate of the 
former possessors, with all the joviality of a comfortable 
natural piety. The closet in his study, where it is probable 
the church treasures had been kept, was filled with the 



332 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

humanities of modern literature, not the less Christian for 
being a little sceptical : and we had a zest in fancying that we 
discoursed of love and wine in the apartments of the Lady- 
Abbess. I remember I had the pleasure of telling an Italian 
gentleman there the joke attributed to Sydney Smith, about 
sitting next a man at table, who possessed a " seven -parson 
power ; " and he understood it, and rolled with laughter, cry- 
ing out — " Oh, ma bello ! ma bellissimo ! " (Beautiful ! ex- 
quisite ! ) There, too, I had the pleasure of dining in com- 
pany with an English beauty (Mrs. W.), who appeared to be 
such as Boccaccio might have admired, capable both of mirth 
and gravity ; and she had a child with her that reflected her 
graces. The appearance of one of these young English 
mothers among Italian women, looks (to English eyes at least) 
like domesticity among the passions. It is a pity when you 
return to England, that the generality of faces do not keep up 
the charm. You are then too apt to think, that an Italian 
beauty among English women would look like poetry among 
the sullens. 

Our friend Brown removed to Florence, and, together with 
the books and newspapers, made me a city visitor. I there 
became acquainted with Landor, to whose genius I had made 
the amende honorable the year before ; and with Mr. Kirkup, 
an English artist, who was not poor enough, I fear, either in 
purse or accomplishment, to cultivate his profession as he 
ought to have done; while at the same time he was so 
beloved by his friends, that they were obliged to get at a 
distance from him before they could tell him of it. Yet I 
know not why they should; for a man of a more cordial 
generosity, with greater delicacy in showing it, I never met 
with: and such men deserve the compliment of openness. 
They know how to receive it. 

To the list of my acquaintances, I had the pleasure of add- 
ing Lord Dillon ; who, in the midst of an exuberance of 
temperament more than national, concealed a depth of under- 
standing, and a genuine humanity of knowledge, to which 
proper justice was not done in consequence. The luxuriant 
vegetation and the unstable ground diverted suspicion from 
the ore beneath it. I remember him saying something one 
evening about a very ill-used description of persons in the 
London streets, for which Shakspeare might have taken him 
by the hand ; though the proposition came in so startling a 
shape, that the company were obliged to be shocked in self- 



FLORENCE: ITALY EST GENERAL. 333 

defence. The gallant Viscount was a cavalier of the old 
school of the Meadowses and Newcastles, with something of 
the O'Neal superadded; and instead of wasting his words 
upon tyrants or Mr. Pitt, ought to have been eternally at the 
head of his brigade, charging mercenaries on his war horse, 
and meditating romantic stories. 

When the Liberal was put an end to, I had contributed 
some articles to a new work set up by my brother, called the 
Literary Examiner. Being too ill at Florence to continue 
those, 1 did what I could, and had recourse to the lightest 
and easiest translation I could think of, wjiich was that of 
Eedi's Bacco in Toscana* The Bacco in Toscana (Bacchus 
in Tuscany), is a mock-heroical account of the Tuscan wines, 
put into the mouth of that god, and delivered in dithyrambics. 
It is ranked among the Italian classics, and deserves to be so 
for its style and originality. Bacchus is represented sitting on 
a hill outside the walls of Florence, in company with Ariadne 
and his usual attendants, and jovially giving his opinion of the 
wines, as he drinks them in succession. Pie gets drunk after 
a very mortal fashion ; but recovers, and is borne away into 
ecstasy by a draught of Montepulciano, which he pronounces 
to be the King of Wines. 

I was the more incited to attempt a version of this poem, 
inasmuch as it was thought a choke-pear for translators. 
English readers asked me how I proposed to render the 
" famous " 

" Mostra aver poco giudizio " — 

(a line much quoted); and Italians asked what I meant to do 
with the " compound words" (which are very scarce in their 
language). I laughed at the famous " mostra aver," which it 
required but a little animal spirits to " give as good as it 
brought ; " and I had the pleasure of informing Italians, that 
the English language abounded in compound words, and could 
make as many more as it pleased. 

At Maiano, I wrote the articles which appeared in the 
Examiner, under the title of the Wishing Cap. Probably 
the reader knows nothing about them; but they contained 

* [In 1824 or 1825 Redi was physician to the Grand Duke Cosmo 
of Tuscany; his love of wine was ideal, for he was himself a water- 
drinker. The autobiographer had met with a copy of it in the JSion 
College Library, while he was yet in prison; and he found in the 
poem mention of Maiano, and of persons, friends of Redi, whose fami- 
lies still remained at Maiano, the Bellini and the Salviati.] 



334 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HTTNT. 

some germs of a book he may not be unacquainted with, 
called The Toivn, as well as some articles since approved of in 
the volume entitled Men, Women, and Boohs. The title was 
very genuine. 

When I put on my cap, and pitched myself in imagination 
into the thick of Covent Garden, the pleasure I received was 
so vivid, — I turned the corner of a street so much in the ordi- 
nary course of things, and was so tangibly present to the pave- 
ment, the shop-windows, the people, and a thousand agreeable 
recollections which looked me naturally in the face, — that 
sometimes when I walk there now, the impression seems hardly 
more real. I used to feel as if I actually pitched my soul 
there, and that spiritual eyes might have seen it shot over from 
Tuscany into York Street, like a rocket. It is much pleasanter, 
however, on waking up, to find soul and body together in one's 
native land : — yes, even than among thy olives and vines, 
Boccaccio! I not only missed " the town" in Italy; I missed 
my old trees — oaks and elms. Tuscany, in point of wood, is 
nothing but olive-ground and vineyard. I saw there, how it 
was, that some persons when they return from Italy say it has 
no wood, and some, a great deal. The fact is, that many parts 
of it, Tuscany included, has no wood to speak of; and it wants 
larger trees interspersed with the small ones, in the manner 
of our hedge-row elms. A tree of a reasonable height is a 
godsend. The olives are low and hazy-looking, like dry sal- 
lows. You have plenty of these ; but to an Englishman, look- 
ing from a height, they appear little better than brushwood. 
Then, there are no meadows, no proper green lanes (at least, 
I saw none), no paths leading over field and stile, no hay- 
fields in June, nothing of that luxurious combination of green 
and russet, of grass, wild flowers, and woods, over which a 
lover of Nature can stroll for hours with a foot as fresh as the 
stag's ; unvexed with chalk, dust, and an eternal public path ; 
and able to lie down, if he will, and sleep in clover. In short 
(saving, alas ! a finer sky and a drier atmosphere, great ingre- 
dients in good spirits), we have the best part of Italy in books; 
and this we can enjoy in England. Give me Tuscany in 
Middlesex or Berkshire, and the Valley of Ladies between 
Harrow and Jack Straw's Castle. The proud names and flinty 
ruins above the Mensola may keep their distance. Boccaccio 
shall build a bower for us out of his books, of all that we 
choose to import ; and we will have daisies and fresh meadows 
besides. An Italian may prefer his own country after the 



FLORENCE : ITALY IN GENERAL. 335 

same fashion; and he is right. I knew a young English- 
woman, who, having grown up in Tuscany, thought the land- 
scapes of her native country insipid, and could not imagine 
how people could live without walks in vineyards. To me, 
Italy had a certain hard taste in the mouth. Its mountains 
were too bare, its outlines too sharp, its lanes too stony, its 
voices too loud, its long summer too dusty. I longed to bathe 
myself in the grassy balm of my native fields. But I was ill, 
unhappy, in a perpetual low fever ; and critics, in such con- 
dition, or in any condition which is not laudatory, should give 
us a list of the infirmities under which they sit down to esti- 
mate what they differ with. What a comfort, by the way, 
that would be to many an author ! What uncongenialities, 
nay, what incompetencies we should discover ! What a relief 
to us to find that it was " only A's opinion !" or " only B's !" 
and how we should laugh at him while giving it in his own 
person, viva voce, instead of the mysterious body corporate of 
" We." Nay, how we do laugh, — provided the bookseller's 
account will let us, provided omissions of notice, or commis- 
sions of it, have not been the ruin of our "edition !" Thus 
may Italians laugh at me, should they read my English criti- 
cisms on their beautiful country. 

Disappointed of transplanting Eedi's Italian vines into 
England, I thought I would try if I could bring over some 
literature of modern English growth into Italy. I proposed 
to a Florentine bookseller to set up a quarterly compila- 
tion from the English magazines. Our periodical publica- 
tions are rarely seen in Italy, though our countrymen are 
numerous. In the year 1825, two hundred English families 
were said to be resident in Florence. In Kome, visitors, 
though not families, were more numerous; and the publica- 
tion, for little cost, might have been sent all over the Penin- 
sula. The plan was to select none but the very best articles, 
and follow them with an original one commenting upon their 
beauties, so as to make readers in Italy well acquainted with 
our living authors. But the Tuscan authorities were frightened. 

"You must submit the publication" (said my bookseller) 
u to a censorship." 

" Be it so." 

" But you must let them see every sheet before it goes to 
press, in order that there may be no religion or politics." 

" Very well: — to please the reverend censors, we will have 
no religion. Politics also are out of the question," 



336 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

" Ay, but politics may creep in." 

" They shall not." 

"Ah, but they may creep in" (say the authorities) "with- 
out your being aware; and then what is to be done?" 

" Why, if neither the editor nor the censors are aware, I 
do not ^see how any very vivid impression need be appre- 
hended with regard to the public." 

" That has a very plausible sound ; but how if the censors 
do not understand English ? " 

" There, indeed, they confound us. All I can say is, that 
the English understand the censors, and I see we must drop 
our intended work." 

This was the substance of a discourse which I had with the 
bookseller, in answer to the communications which he brought 
me from his Government. The prospectus had been drawn 
out; the bookseller had rubbed his hands at it, thinking of 
the money which the best writers in England were preparing 
for him; but he was forced to give up the project. "Ah," 
said he to me in his broken English, as he sat in winter-time 
with cold feet and an irritable face, pretending to keep himself 
warm by tantalizing the tips of his fingers over a little bason 
of charcoal, " Ah, you are vere happee in England. You can 
get so much money as you please." 

I know not what the Tuscan Government would have said 
to another book which I wrote at Maiano, and which English 
readers have not yet heard of, at least not publicly; for, 
though intended for publication, and the least faulty book, 
perhaps, which I have written, it has hitherto been only 
privately circulated. [A warmhearted friend, of admirable 
taste, who has subsequently achieved for himself a high place 
in literature, requested, and obtained, leave to print it at his 
own expense.] It is entitled, Christianism, or Belief and 
Unbelief Reconciled ; and contains, among other matters, the 
conclusions which the author had then come to on points of 
religious belief and practice. I wrote it because I was in a 
state of health which I thought might terminate fatally, and I 
was anxious before I died to do what good I could, as far as 
my reflections on those points had, in my opinion, enabled 
me. I shall say more of it towards the end of this volume. 
I had the consolation — I hope not the unchristian one — of 
writing it at a window opposite the dissolved convent of the 
Doccia; for though I contemplated with pleasure that image 
of departing superstition — then a lay abode, beautifully over 






FLOEEXCE : ITALY IN GENERAL. oo7 

looking the country — the book had any design in the world 
but that of grieving one gentle heart.* 

Attached, however, as associations of this nature, and those 
with Boccaccio and Recti, contributed to make me to my 
country walks, I often varied them by going into Florence; 
or rather, I went there whenever the graver part of them 
became too much for me. I loved Florence, and saw nothing 
in it but cheerfulness and elegance. I loved the name; I 
loved the fine arts and the old palaces ; I loved the memories 
of Pulci and Lorenzo de' Medici, the latter of whom I could 
never consider in any other light than that of a high-minded 
patron of genius, himself a poet; I loved the good-natured, 
intelligent inhabitants, who saw fair play between industry 
and amusement; nay, I loved the Government itself, however 
afraid it was of English periodicals; for at that time it was 
good-natured also, and could " live and let live," after a certain 
quiet fashion, in that beautiful bye-corner of Europe, where 
there were no longer any wars, nor any great regard for the 
parties that had lately waged them, illegitimate or legitimate. 
The reigning family were Austrians, but with a difference, 
long Italianized, and with no great family affection. One 
good-natured Grand Duke had succeeded another for several 
generations; and the liberalism of that extraordinary prince, 
the first Leopold, was still to be felt, in a general way, very 
sensibly, though it lost in some particulars after the triumph 
of the allies, and the promises broken to the Carbonari ;f nor, 
indeed, has the reigning Grand Duke in his old age and his 
fright about Mazzini, bettered them. 

* This book has been since enlarged and systematized, and is now 
entitled the Religion of the Heart. 

f The sixth volume of the Florentine History of the late Captain 
Henry Edward Napier is almost entirely occupied by a full and 
excellent account of the reign of this admirable and indeed wonderful 
prince, Leopold the First, Grand Duke of Tuscany, afterwards 
Emperor of Germany. He was not only a reformer, but a reformer 
of the noblest and most liberal kind, and this, too, notwithstand- 
ing opposition the most harassing from the priests, from his own 
ministers, nay, actually from the very nation for whom he reformed, 
and who had not yet been well taught enough to understand him. 
Such readers as are not acquainted with him, are earnestly recom- 
mended to become so; and they cannot do it better than in the pages 
of Captain Napier, who w T as himself a worthy member of a remark- 
able family, and a writer as honest as he was painstaking. I have 
the honour to possess a copy of his work, given me by himself; and 
I regret that I had not time to make that thorough intimacy with it 
before he died, which would have enabled me to say of it what I say 

22 



338 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Talking of Grand Dukes and de' Medicis, be it known, 
before I forget to mention it (so modest am I by nature), that 
on one of these visits to Florence, and in the house of a 
Medici himself, I had the happiness of folding to my bosom, 
with reciprocal pleasure in our faces, no less a personage than 
a certain lovely Maddalena de' Medici, daughter of said dis- 
tinguished individual, and now, at this moment, in all proba- 
bility, lovelier than ever; seeing, alas! that she was then 
little more than a baby, just able to express her satisfaction 
at being noticed by her admirers. 

I wish I could equally have admired the famous Yenus 
de' Medici, in whom I expected to find the epitome of all 
that was charming; for I had been led, by what I thought 
the popular misrepresentations of her, to trust almost as little 
to plaster casts as to engravings. But how shall I venture to 
express what I felt? how T own the disappointment which I 
shared with the " Smellfungus " of Sterne, instead of the 
raptures which I had looked for in unison with Sterne him- 
self, and Thomson, and, perhaps, all the travelled connois- 
seurs of the earth, Smollett alone and Hazlitt excepted ? 

When the intelligent traveller approaches Florence, when 
he ascends the top of the gentle mountains that surround it, 
and sees the beautiful city lying in a plain full of orchards — 
w T hat are the anticipations and ideas in which he indulges? 
Not surely images of a Grand Duke, however grand or even 
good he may be, nor of divers other Grand Dukes that pre- 
ceded him, nor of the difference between tables-d'hote, nor any 
such local phenomena, eminent i-n the eyes of the postilion : — 
he thinks of the old glories of Florence : of Lorenzo de' 
Medici, of Dante, of Boccaccio, of Michael Angelo, of Galileo, 
of the river Arno and Fiesole, of the rank which that small 
city has challenged, by the sole power of wit, among the 
greatest names of the earth ; of the lively and clever genera- 
tion that have adorned it, playing their music, painting their 
pictures, and pouring forth a language of pearls; and last, 
but not least, he thinks of the goddess who still lives there — 
the far-famed Yenus de' Medici, triumphing in her worshippers 
as if no such thing as a new religion had taken place, and 
attracting adoration from all parts of the earth. 

now. I do not agree with some of his conclusions respecting what is 
finally desirable in the nature of government; but I do not wonder 
at them, considering what a set of iniquitous princes he had for the 
most ]>art to describe. 



FLORENCE : ITALY IN GENERAL. ooO 

He enters, and worships likewise. I, too, entered and 
worshipped, prepared to be the humblest of her admirers. I 
did not even hurry to the gallery as soon as I arrived. I 
took a respectful time for going properly. When I entered 
the room, I retained my eyes a little on the objects around 
her, willing to make my approaches like a devout lover, and 
to prepare myself for that climax of delight. It seemed too 
great a pleasure to be vulgarly and abruptly taken. At length 

I look. I behold, and I worship indeed ; but not for the old 
reasons. How shall I venture to state the new ones? I 
must make a little further preface, and will take the oppor- 
tunity of noticing the gallery itself. 

The celebrated Florentine Gallery is an oblong, occupying 
the upper story of a whole street of government offices. The 
street is joined at the end, though opening into a portico 
underneath on the river Arno, so that the gallery runs almost 
entirely round the three sides. The longer corridor is 430 
feet long (French), the intermediate one 97 feet. They are 

II feet broad, 20 feet high, floored with variegated stucco, and 
painted on the roof in fresco. 

The windows are ample, curtained from the sun, and gene- 
rally opened to admit the air. The whole forms a combina- 
tion of neatness and richness, of clear and soft light, of silence, 
firmness, and grace, worthy to be the cabinet of what it con- 
tains. These contents are statues, busts, pictures, sarcophagi; 
the paintings filling the interstices between the sculptures, 
and occupying the continued space over their heads. The 
first things you behold on entering the gallery are busts of 
Roman emperors and their kindred. 

But these more obvious portions of the gallery are not all. 
These illustrious corridors present certain tempting-looking 
doors, which excite curiosity, and these doors open into 
rooms which are the very boudoirs of connoisseurship. They 
contain specimens of the different schools, collections of gems 
and medals, and select assemblages from the whole artistic 
treasure. One of them, called the Tribune, little more per- 
haps than 20 feet in diameter, is a concentration of beauty 
and wealth. It is an octagon, lighted- from above, floored 
with precious marble, and over-arched with a cupola adorned 
with mother-o'-pearl. But I knew nothing of all this till I 
read it in a book. I saw only the pictures and the statues. 
Here, among other wonderful things, is the more wonderful 
Venus of Titian. Here is the Fornarina of Raphael ; his 

22—2 



840 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Julius the Second, with four other pictures, showing the pro- 
gress of his hand ; the adoring Virgin of Correggio ; the 
Epiphany of Albert Durer ; a masterpiece of Vandyke ; 
another of Paul Veronese ; another by Domenichino ; another 
by Leonardo da Vinci. In the middle of the room, forming 
a square, stand the famous Apollo, with his arm over his 
head, leaning on a tree ; the Grinder, or Listening Slave ; the 
Wrestlers ; and the Faun Playing the Cymbals. And as the 
climax of attraction to all this, with the statues and paintings 
in attendance, elevated by herself, opposite the doorway, and 
approached by a greater number of pilgrims than are now 
drawn to Italy by the Virgin herself, presides the goddess of 
the place, the ancient deity restored and ever young — the 
far-famed Venus de' Medici. 

" So stands the statue which enchants the world P 

Seeing what I saw, and feeling as I did, when I first beheld 
this renowned production, glittering with the admiration of 
ages as well as its own lustre, it was easy to conceive the in- 
dignation which the Florentines displayed when they saw it 
take its departure for France, and the vivacity w r ith which 
Bonaparte broke out when he spoke of its acquisition. (See 
page 78 of this volume.) 

After this second preface, which is another genuine tran- 
script of my feelings on entering the room, I should again be 
at a loss how to venture upon the opinion I am about to ex- 
press, if I did not recollect that the entire statue is acknow- 
ledged not to be antique, and that the very important part 
which called forth my disappointment is by some supposed not 
to be so. The statue was originally dug up near Tivoli, at 
Hadrian's Villa, and was then in a broken as well as in a muti- 
lated state. Luckily the divisions were such as to refit easily; 
but it is confessed that the whole right arm was wanting, and 
so was part of the left arm from the elbow downwards. 

" With the exception of a little bit of the body or so," says 
the French editor of the Guide, " all the rest is evidently an- 
tique."* 

This, it appears, is disputable; but nobody doubts the 
greater part of the body, and the body is certainly divine. 
Luckily for me, I approached the statue on the left as you 
enter the door, so that I first saw it from the point of view 

* [The work of Praxiteles has undoubtedly been pieced by resto- 
rations in the head, and some part of the arms; but the restoration 
itself is supposed to be antique.] 



FLORENCE: ITALY IN GENERAL. 341 

which shows it to most advantage. The timid praises which 
cold northern criticism ventures to bestow upon naked beauty, 
are not calculated to do it justice. The good faith with which 
I speak must warrant me in resorting to the more pictorial 
allowances and swelling words of the Italians. The really 
modest will forgive me, at all events ; and I am only afraid 
that the prudish will be disappointed at not having enough to 
blame. Hips and sides, however (if they understand such 
words), will do. We first vulgarize our terms with a coarse 
imagination, and then are afraid to do justice to what they 
express. It was not so with our ancient admirers of beauty, 
the Spensers and Philip Sidneys; and they, I believe, were 
not worse men than ourselves. It would be difficult nowa- 
days to convey, in English, the impression of the Italian word 
fianchi (flanks) with the requisite delicacy, in speaking of the 
naked human figure. We use it to mean only the sides of an 
army, of a fortified place, or of a beast. Yet the words rile- 
vati fianchi (flanks in relief) are used by the greatest Italian 
poets to express a beauty, eminent among all beautiful females 
who are not pinched and spoilt by modern fashions ; and this 
is particularly the case with the figure which the sculptor pre- 
sented to his mind in forming the Venus de' Medici. Fielding, 
in one of his passages about Sophia, would help me out with 
the rest. But to those who have seen the Venus of Canova, it 
is sufficient to say, that in all which constitutes the loveliness 
of the female figure, the Venus de' Medici is the reverse of 
that lank and insipid personage. Venus, above all goddesses, 
ought to be a woman ; whereas the statue of Canova, with its 
straight sides and Frenchified head of hair, is the image (if 
of anything at all) of Fashion affecting Modesty. The finest 
view of the Venus de' Medici is a three-quarter one, looking 
towards the back of the head. Let the statue rest its fame 
on this. It is perfection ; if, indeed, the shoulders are not a 
thought too broad. But the waist, and all thereunto belong- 
ing — I would quote Sir Philip Sidney at once, if I were sure 
I had none but an audience worthy of him. The feet are very 
beautiful — round, light, and tender. It is justly said, that there 
is no cast of the Venus which gives a proper idea of the original. 
Perhaps the nature of the marble is one of the reasons. It 
has warmth, and a polish that swims away with the eye ; such 
as what Horace speaks of in the countenance of his mistress — 

" Vultus nimium lubicrus aspici." 

u Looks too slippery to be looked upon." — Creecii. 



34:2 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Alas ! not so the face, nor the gesture. When I saw the face, 
all the charms of the body vanished. Thomson thought 
otherwise — 

" Bashful she bends ; her well-taught look aside 
Turns in enchanting guise, where dubious mix 
Vain conscious beauty, a dissembled sense 
Of modest shame, and slippery looks of love. 
The gazer grows enamour'd ; and the stone. 
As if exulting in its conquest, smiles." 

See the poem of Liberty, part the fourth. But Thomson writes 
like a poet who made what he went to find. I was not so 
lucky. I do not remember what it was that Smollett, in his 
morbid spleen, said of the Venus. Something, if Sterne is to 
be believed, not very decent. I hope I am not going to be- 
have myself as ill. With all my admiration of Smollett and 
his masterly writing, I would rather err with the poetical 
Scotchman, than be right with the prose one ; but setting 
aside the body (which, if Smollett said anything indecent 
against, I say he spoke in a manner worthy of his friend Pere- 
grine Pickle), I must make bold to say, that I think neither the 
gesture of the figure modest, nor the face worthy even of the 
gesture. Yes ; perhaps it is worthy of the gesture, for affected 
modesty and real want of feeling go together ; and, to my mind, 
the expression of the face (not to rnince the matter, now I must 
come to it) is pert, petty, insolent, and fastidious. It is the 
face of a foolish young woman, who thinks highly of herself, 
and is prepared to be sarcastic on all her acquaintance. 

I cling eagerly to the supposition that the head is not an 
antique; and, I must add, that, if artists are warranted (as 
they very probably are) in deducing a necessity of the present 
position of the hands from the turn of the shoulders, the hands 
were certainly not in their present finical taste. A different 
character given to them would make a world of difference in 
the expression of the figure. It is not to be supposed that 
the sculptor intended to make a sophisticate pert Venus, such 
as nobody could admire. It is out of all probability. There 
is too much sentiment in the very body. On the other hand, 
the expression is neither graceful and good enough for the 
diviner aspect of the Goddess of Love, nor sufficiently festive 
and libertine for the other character under which she was 
worshipped. It might be said, that the Greek women, in con- 
sequence of the education they received, were more famous 
for the beauty of their persons than for the expression of their 



FLORENCE : ITALY IN GENERAL. 343 

faces; that the artist, therefore, copied this peculiarity of his 
countrywomen ; that it might not have been his object to 
excel in expression of countenance ; or that he could not, per- 
haps, have made a face equal to the figure, his talent not 
being equally turned for both. But it is said, on the other 
hand, that the women of Greece, owing to moral causes of 
some kind, were inferior to the other sex in beauty, so that 
artists took their models from among those of a certain licensed 
order, who, strange to say, were the only females that received 
a good education ; and certainly it is possible that the Venus 
de' Medici may have been a portrait of one of those anoma- 
lous personages. The face, however, has the very worst look 
of meretriciousness, which is want of feeling; and this, we are 
bound to suppose, would at least have been veiled under a 
pleasant and more winning aspect. That it may not have 
been the sculptor's object to render the face worthy of the 
figure, it is hardly possible to conceive; though it may be 
conceded that he would have found it difficult to do so, espe- 
cially in marble. But the question lies, not between a figure 
divine and a face unequal to it, but between a figure divine 
and a face altogether unworthy. Apuleius has said, that if 
Venus herself were bald, she would no longer be Venus. It 
is difficult not to agree with him. And yet with much more 
truth might he have said, that Venus could not be Venus 
without attractiveness of expression. A beautiful figure is not 
all, nor even half. It is far more requisite to have beauty in 
the eyes, beauty in the smile, and that graceful and affectionate 
look of approach, or of meeting the approacher half way, 
which the Latins expressed by a word taken from the same 
root as her name, Venustas. The cestus was round the waist ; 
but what gave it its power ? Winning looks, tenderness, 
delightful discourse, the whole power of seduction and enter- 
tainment, such as Homer has described it, in verses rich as 
the girdle. Now, there is nothing of all this in the Venus de 1 
Medici. Her face seems to vilify and to vulgarize all which 
her person inspires. Even the countenance of Titian's Venus, 
which hangs on the wall behind the statue, just over its head, 
as if on purpose to out-do it, succeeds in so doing ; and yet 
this naked figure, though called a Venus, is nothing more, I 
believe, than the portrait of somebody's mistress, not roman- 
tically delicate, and waiting till an old woman in the back- 
ground brings her her clothes to get up. But not to mention 
that it is an excellent painting, the expression of the face is at 



344 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

least genuine and to the purpose, and the whole figure worthy 
to be adored in the temple of the Venus Pandemos, if not of 
the diviner one. 

Upon the whole, I found the busts of the Roman emperors 
far more interesting than this renowned statue. Julius Cesar 
leads them, with a thin face, traversed in all directions with 
wrinkles. I thought I had never beheld such a care-worn 
countenance. Such was the price he paid for ruling his 
happier fellow - creatures. Augustus, on the contrary, has 
quite a prosperous aspect, — healthy, elegant, and composed, — 
though, if I remember rightly, the expression was hard. You 
thought he could easily enough put his sign-manual to the 
proscription. His daughter Julia (I speak on all these points 
from memory) has a fat, voluptuous face, and (I think) wore a 
wig; at all events, her hair was dressed in some high, artificial 
manner. I think also she had a double chin, though she was 
far from old. You could well enough fancy her letting Ovid 
out, at a back staircase. Somebody — Hazlitt, I think — said 
that the Eoman emperors in this gallery had more of an ordi- 
nary English look than what we conceive of the Roman ; and, 
if I am not mistaken at this distance of time, I agreed with 
him. There was the good English look with the good, the dull 
with the dull, and so on. Domitian had exactly the pert 
aspect of a footman peering about him in a doorway. The 
look, however, of the glutton Vitellius was something mon- 
strous. His face was simply vulgar, but he had a throat like 
that of a pelican. Nero's face it was sad to contemplate. There 
is a series of busts of him at different periods of his life ; one, 
that of a charming happy little boy ; another, that of a young 
man growing uneasy ; and a third, that of the miserable tyrant. 
You fancied that he was thinking of having killed his 
mother, and was trying to bully his conscience into no care 
about it. 

After all, I know not whether the most interesting sight in 
Florence is not a little mysterious bit of something looking 
like parchment, which is shown you under a glass case in the 
principal public library. It stands pointing towards heaven, 
and is one of the fingers of Galileo. The hand to which 
it belonged is supposed to have been put to the torture by the 
Inquisition, for ascribing motion to the earth ; and the finger 
is now worshipped for having proved the motion. After this, 
let no suffering reformer's pen misgive him. If his cause be 
good, justice will be done it some day. 



FLORENCE: ITALY IN GENERAL. 345 

But I must return to Maiano, in order to take leave of it 
for England ; for the fortunes of the Examiner, as far as its 
then proprietors were concerned, had now come to their 
crisis; and constant anxiety in a foreign land for the very 
subsistence of my family was not to be borne any longer. I 
need not enter into some private matters which had tended to 
produce this aggravation of a public result. Suffice to say, 
that the author's customary patron — the bookseller — enabled 
me to move homewards; and that I did so with joy, which 
almost took away half my cares. 

My last day in Italy was jovial. I had a proper Baccha- 
nalian parting with Florence. A stranger and I cracked a 
bottle together in high style. He ran against me with a flask 
of wine in his hand, and divided it gloriously between us. 
My white waistcoat was drenched into rose colour. It was 
impossible to be angry with his good-humoured face ; so we 
complimented one another on our joviality, and parted on the 
most flourishing terms. In the evening I cracked another 
flask, with equal abstinence of inside. Mr. Kirkup made me 
a present of a vine-stick. He came to Maiano with Brown, 
to take leave of us ; so we christened the stick as they do a 
seventy-four, and he stood rocZ-father. 

We set off next morning at six o'clock. I took leave of 
Maiano with a dry eye, Boccaccio and the Valley of Ladies 
notwithstanding. But the grave face of Brown (who had 
stayed all night, and who was to continue doing us service 
after we had gone, by seeing to our goods and chattels) was 
not so easily to be parted with. I was obliged to gulp down 
a sensation in the throat, such as men cannot very well afford 
to confess " in these degenerate days," though Achilles and 
old Lear made nothing of owning it. 

But before I quit Italy altogether, I will describe some of 
our further impressions about it, both physical and moral, 
and general as well as particular. 

You find yourself in Virgil's country the moment you see 
the lizards running up the walls, and hear the cicadcc. (now 
cicale) " bursting the bushes with their song." This famous 
"grasshopper" of Anacreon,, as the translators call it, which 
is not a grasshopper but a beetle, sitting on the trees, pro- 
duces his "song" by scraping a hollow part of his chest 
with certain muscles. The noise is so loud, as well as inces- 
sant during the heats of the summer-days, as to resemble that 
of a stocking-manufactory. Travellers in Sicily declare, that 



346 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OV LEIGH HOTT. 

while conversing with a friend along a wood, you sometimes 
cannot be heard for them. 

All the insect tribes, good and bad, acquire vigour and size 
as they get southward. We found, however, but one scorpion 
in-doors, and he was young. We were looking on him with 
much interest, and speculating upon his turn of mind, when a 
female servant quietly took out her scissors, and cut him in 
two. Her bile, with eating oil and minestra, was as much 
exalted as his. Scorpions, however, are no very dangerous 
things in Italy. The gnats are bad enough without them, and 
even the flies are almost as bad as the gnats. The zanzaliere 
(the bed-net against the gnats) appeared almost as necessary 
against the flies, as against the enemy from whom it is named. 

But there is one insect which is equally harmless and beau- 
tiful. It succeeds the noisy cicala of an evening ; and is of so 
fairy-like a nature and lustre, that it would be almost worth 
coming into the south to look at it, if there were no other at- 
traction. I allude to the fire-fly. Imagine thousands of flash- 
ing diamonds every night powdering the ground, the trees, 
and the air, especially in the darkest places, and in the corn- 
fields. They give at once a delicacy and brilliance to Italian 
darkness, inconceivable. It is the glow-worm, winged, and 
flying in crowds. In England it is the female alone that can 
be said to give light ; that of the male, who is the exclusive 
possessor of the wings, is hardly perceptible. " Worm" is a 
wrong word, the creature being a real insect. The Tuscan 
name is lucciola, little-light. In Genoa they call them ccee- 
belle (chiare -belle), clear and pretty. When held in the hand, 
the little creature is discovered to be a dark-coloured beetle, 
but without the hardness or sluggish look of the beetle tribe. 
The light is contained in the under part of the extremity of 
the abdomen, exhibiting a dull golden-coloured section by day, 
and flashing occasionally by daylight, especially when the hand 
is shaken. At night the flashing is that of the purest and most 
lucid fire, spangling the vineyards and olive-trees, and their 
dark avenues, with innumerable stars. Its use is not known. 
In England, and I believe here, the supposition is that it is a 
signal of love. It aflbrds no perceptible heat, but is supposed 
to be phosphoric. In a dark room, a single one is sufficient 
to flash a light against the wall. I have read of a lady in the 
West Indies who could see to read by the help of three under 
a glass, as long as they chose to accommodate her. During 
our abode in Genoa a few of them were commonly in our rooms 



FLORENCE: ITALY IN GENERAL. 317 

all night, going about like little sparkling elves. It is impos- 
sible not to think of something spiritual in seeing the progress 
of one of them through a dark room. You only know it by 
the flashing of its lamp which takes place every two or three 
feet apart, sometimes oftener, thus marking its track in and 
out of the apartment, or about it. It is like a little fairy taking 
its rounds. These insects remind us of the lines in Herri ck, 
inviting his mistress to come to him at night-time, and they 
suit them still better than his English, ones : — 

" Their lights the glow-worms lend thee ; 
The shooting-stars attend thee ; 
And the elves also, 
Whose little eyes glow, 
Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee." 

To me, who when I was in Italy passed more of my time, 
even than usual, in the ideal world, the spiritual-looking little 
creatures were more than commonly interesting. Shelley used 
to watch them for hours. I looked at them, and wondered 
whether any of the particles he left upon earth helped to 
animate their loving and lovely light. The last fragment 
he wrote, which was a welcome to me on my arrival from 
I England, began with a simile taken from their dusk look 
and the fire underneath it, in which he found a likeness to 
his friend. They had then just made their appearance for the 
season. 

There is one circumstance respecting these fire-flies, quite 
as extraordinary as any. There is no mention of them in the 
ancient poets. Now, of all insects, even southern, they are, 
perhaps, the most obvious to poetical notice. It is difficult to 
conceive how any poet, much more a pastoral or an amatory 
poet, could help speaking of them ; and yet they make their 
appearance neither in Greek nor Latin verse, neither in 
Homer, nor Virgil, nor Ovid, nor Anacreon, nor Theocritus. 
The earliest mention of them, with which I am acquainted, is 
in Dante (Inferno, canto 21), where he compares the spirits 
in the eighth circle of hell, who go about swathed in fire, to 
the "lucciole" in a rural valley of an evening. A truly 
saturnine perversion of a beautiful object. Does nature put 
forth a new production now and then, like an author ? Or 
has: the glow-worm been exalted into the fire-fly by the 
greater heat of the modern Italian soil, which appears indis- 
putable ? The supposition is, I believe, that the fire-fly was 
brought into Europe from the New World. 



348 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

With respect to wood in Italy, olive-trees in particular, 
travellers hearing so much of the latter, and accustomed to 
their pickled fruit, are generally disappointed at sight of 
them. Whether my enthusiasm was borne out by judgment, 
I cannot say, but I liked them, at least in combination. An 
olive-tree by itself is hardly to be called handsome, unless it 
is young, in which state it is very much so, quite warranting 
Homer's comparison with it of the slain youth. It is then 
tender-looking and elegant. When old the leaves are stiff, 
hard, pointed, willow-like, dark above, and of a light leathern 
colour underneath ; the trunk slight, dry-looking, crooked ; 
and it almost always branches off into a double stem at a little 
distance from the ground. A wood of olive-trees looks like a 
huge hazy bush, more light than dark, and glimmering with 
innumerable specks, which are the darker sides of the leaves. 
When they are in fruit they seem powdered with myriads of 
little black balls. My wife said, that olive-trees looked as if 
they only grew by moonlight ; which gives a better idea of 
their light, faded aspect, than a more prosaical description. 

The pine-tree is tall, dark, and comparatively branchless, 
till it spreads at top into a noble, solid-looking head, wide and 
stately. It harmonizes as beautifully with extended land- 
scape, as architectural towers, or as ships at sea. 

The cypress is a poplar in shape, but more sombre, stately, 
and heavy ; not to be moved by every flippant air. It is of a 
beautiful dark colour, and contrasts admirably with trees of a 
rounder figure. Two or three cypress -trees by the side of a 
white or yellow cottage, slated and windowed like our new 
cottage-houses near London, the windows often without glass, 
are alone sufficient to form a Tuscan picture, and constantly 
remind you that you are at a distance from home. 

The consumption, by the way, of olive oil is immense. It 
is probably no mean exasperator of Italian bile. The author 
of an Italian Art of Health approves a moderate use of it, both 
in diet and medicine; but says, that as soon as it is cooked, 
fried, or otherwise abused, it inflames the blood, disturbs the 
humours, irritates the fibres, and produces other effects very 
superfluous in a stimulating climate. The notoriousness of 
the abuse makes him cry out, and ask how much better it 
would be to employ this pernicious quantity of oil in lighting 
the streets and roads. He thinks it necessary, however, to 
apologize to his countrymen for this apparent inattention 
to their pecuniary profits, adding, that he makes amends by 



FLORENCE: ITALY IN GENERAL. 349 

diverting them into another channel. I fear the two ledgers 
would make a very different show of profit and loss: not to 
mention, that unless the oil were consecrated, or the lamps 
hung very high, it would assuredly be devoured. We had no 
little difficulty in keeping the servants from disputing its food 
with our lamp-light. Their lucubrations were of a more 
internal nature than ours. 

" The rather thou, 
Celestial oil shine inwards." 

I was told that the olive-trees grew finer and finer as you 
went southwards. 

The chestnut-trees are very beautiful; the spiky-looking 
branches of leaves, long, and of a noble green, make a glorious 
show as you look up against the intense blue of the sky. Is 
it a commonplace to say that the castanets used in dancing, 
evidently originated in the nuts of this tree, castagnette ? 
They are made in general, I believe, of cockle-shells, or an 
imitation of them; but the name renders their vegetable 
descent unequivocal. It is pleasant to observe the simple 
origin of pleasant things. Some loving peasants, time imme- 
morial, fall dancing under the trees : they pick up the nuts, 
rattle them in their hands; and behold (as the Frenchman 
says) the birth of the accompaniment of the fandango. 

Thus much for insects and trees. Among the human 
novelties that impress a stranger in Italy, I have not before 
noticed the vivacity prevalent among all classes of people. 
The gesticulation is not French. It has an air of greater 
simplicity and sincerity, and has more to do with the eyes 
and expression of countenance. But after being used to it, 
the English must look like a nation of scorners and prudes. 
When serious, the women walk with a certain piquant state - 
liness, the same which impressed the ancient as well as 
modern poets of Italy, Virgil in particular ; but it has no 
haughtiness. You might imagine them walking up to a 
dance, or priestesses of Venus approaching a temple. "When 
lively, their manner out of doors is that of our liveliest 
women within. It' they make a quicker movement than usual, 
if they recognize a friend, for instance, or call out to some- 
body, or despatch somebody with a message, they have all the 
life, simplicity, and unconsciousness of the happiest of our 
young women, who are at ease in their gardens or parks. 

On becoming intimate with Genoa, I found that it possesses 



350 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

multitudes of handsome women ; and what surprised me, 
many of them with beautiful northern complexions. But an 
English lady told me, that for this latter discovery I was 
indebted to my short sight. This is probable. I have often, 
I confess, been in raptures at faces that have passed me in 
London, whose only faults were being very coarse and con- 
siderably bilious. It is not desirable, however, to have a 
Brobdignagian sight ; and where the mouth is sweet and the 
eyes intelligent, there is always the look of beauty with a 
right observer. Now, I saw heaps of such faces in Genoa. 
The superiority of the women over the men was indeed re- 
markable, and is to be accounted for perhaps by the latter 
being wrapt and screwed up in money-getting. Yet it is 
just the reverse, I understand, at Naples; and the Neapo- 
litans are accused of being as sharp at a bargain as anybody. 
What is certain, however, is, that in almost all parts of Italy, 
gentility of appearance is on the side of the females. The 
rarity of a gentlemanly look in the men is remarkable. The 
commonness of it among women of all classes is equally 
so. The former was certainly not the case in old times, if 
we are to trust the portraits handed down to us ; nor, 
indeed, could it easily have been believed, if left upon record. 
What is the cause, then, of this extraordinary degeneracy? 
Is it, after all, an honourable one to the Italians ? Is it 
that the men, thinking of the moral and political situation 
of their country, and so long habituated to feel themselves 
degraded, acquire a certain instinctive carelessness and con- 
tempt of appearance; while the women, on the other hand, 
more taken up with their own affairs, with the conscious- 
ness of beauty, and the flattery which is more or less paid 
them, have retained a greater portion of their self-possession 
and esteem ? The alteration, whatever it is owing to, is of 
the worst kind. The want of gentility is not supplied, as 
it so often is with us, by a certain homely simplicity and 
manliness, quite as good in its way, and better, where the 
former does not include the better part of it. The appearance, 
to use a modern cant phrase, has a certain raffishness in it, 
like that of a suspicious-looking fellow in England, who 
lounges about with his hat on one side, and a flower in his 
mouth. Nor is it confined to men in trade, whether high or 
low; though at the same time I must observe, that all men, 
high or low (with the exceptions, of course, that take place 
in every case), are given to pinching and saving, keeping their 



FLORENCE: ITALY EST GENERAL. 351 

servants upon the lowest possible allowance, and eating as 
little as need be themselves, with the exception of their 
favourite minestra, of which I will speak presently, and which 
being a cheap as well as favourite dish, they gobble in suffi- 
cient quantity to hinder their abstinence in other things from 
being regarded as the effect of temperance. In Pisa, the 
great good of life was a hot supper ; but at Pisa and Genoa 
both, as in " the city" with us, if you overheard any thing- 
said in the streets, it was generally about money. Quatrini, 
soldi, and lire, were discussed at every step. A stranger, 
full of the Italian poets and romances, is surprised to find the 
southern sunshine teeming with this northern buzz. One 
thinks sometimes that men would not know what to do with 
their time, if it were not for that succession of hopes and 
fears, which constitutes the essence of trade. It looks like a 
good-humoured invention of nature to save the major part 
of mankind from getting tired to death with themselves ; but, 
in truth, it is a necessity of progression. All mankind must 
be fused together, before they know how to treat one another 
properly, and to agree upon final good. Prince Albert's 
project for next year* is a great lift in this direction. It was 
a most happy thought for combining the ordinary and extra- 
ordinary interests of the world. 

One of the greatest causes of the deterioration of the 
modern Italian character, has been the chicanery, sensuality, 
falsehood, worldliness, and petty feeling of all sorts, exhibited 
by the Court of Rome. Mazzini has denounced it in eloquence, 
of which the earth has not yet seen the result, however 
extraordinary its consequences have been already in the events 
at Rome. But the same things were talked of when I was 
in Italy, and the truth very freely uttered. 

The Italians owned, that for centuries they had been accus- 
tomed to see the most exalted persons among them, and a 
sacred court, full of the pettiest and most selfish vices ; that, 
while they had instinctively lost their respect for those persons, 
they had, nevertheless, beheld them the most flourishing of 
their countrymen ; and that they had been taught, by their 
example, to make such a distinction between belief and prac- 
tice, as would startle the saving grace of the most lawless of 
Calvinists. From what I saw myself (and I woidd not mention 
it, if it had not been corroborated by others who resided in 

* The first Crystal Palace. [The remark was written in 1850, and 
it is difficult to correct it without altering the context] 



352 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 



Italy for years) there was a prevailing contempt of truth in the 
country, that would have astonished even an oppressed Irish- 
man. It formed an awful comment upon those dangers of 
catechizing people into insincerity, which Bentham pointed out 
in his Church-of-Englandism. We in England are far enough, 
God knows, from this universality of evil yet ; and some of the 
most conscientious of our clergy themselves have lately been 
giving remarkable indication of their disinterested horror on 
the subject. May such writers, and such readers of them, 
always be found to preserve us from it ! In Shelley's preface 
to the tragedy of the Cenci, which was written at Rome, the 
religious nature of this profanation of truth is pointed out with 
equal acuteness and eloquence. I have heard instances of 
falsehood, not merely in shops, but among "ladies and gentle- 
men," so extreme, so childish, and apparently so unconscious 
of wrong, that the very excess of it, however shocking in one 
respect, relieved one's feelings in another. It showed how 
much might be done by proper institutions, to exalt the 
character of a people who are by nature so ingenuous. But 
received Italian virtues, under their present governments, 
consist in being Catholic (that is to say, in going to confession), 
in not being " taken in" by others, and in taking in every- 
body else. Persons employed to do the least or the greatest 
jobs, will alike endeavour to cheat you through thick and 
thin. Such, at least, was the case when I was in Italy. It 
was a perpetual warfare, in which you were obliged to fight in 
self-defence. If you paid anybody what he asked you, it never 
entered into his imagination that you did it from anything but 
folly. You were pronounced a minchione (a ninny), one @f 
their greatest terms of reproach. On the other hand, if you 
battled well through the bargain, a perversion of the natural 
principle of self-defence led to a feeling of respect for you. 
Dispute might increase ; the man might grin, stare, threaten ; 
might pour out torrents of argument and of " injured inno- 
cence," as they always do; but be firm, and he went away 
equally angry and admiring. Did anybody condescend to 
take them in, the admiration as well as the anger was still in 
proportion, like that of the gallant knights of old when they 
were beaten in single combat. 

The famous order of things called Cicisbeism is the conse- 
quence of a state of society more inconsistent than itself, 
though less startling to the habits of the world ; but it was 
managed in a foolish manner ; and, strange to say, it was 









FLORENCE: ITALY IX GEXESAL. 3o3 

almost as gross, more formal, and quite as hypocritical as what 
it displaced. It is a stupid system. The poorer the people, 
the less, of course, it takes place among them ; but as the 
husband, in all cases, has the most to do for his family, and 
is the person least cared for, he is resolved to get what he can 
before marriage ; so a vile custom prevails among the poorest, 
by which no girl can get married unless she brings a certain 
dowry. Unmarried females are also watched with exceeding 
strictness ; and in order to obtain at once a husband and 
freedom, every nerve is strained to get this important dowry. 
Daughters scrape up, servants pilfer for it. If they were not 
obliged to ornament themselves, as a help towards their object, 
I do not know whether even the natural vanity of youth would 
not be sacrificed, and girls hang out rags as a proof of their 
hoard, instead of the " outward and visible sign " of crosses 
and ear-rings. Dress, however, disputes the palm with saving; 
and as a certain consciousness of their fine eyes and their 
natural graces survives everything else among southern woman- 
kind, English people have no conception of the high hand with 
which the humblest females in Italy carry it at a dance or an 
evening party. Hair dressed up, white gowns, satins, flowers, 
fans, and gold ornaments, all form a part of the glitter of the 
evening, and all, too, amidst as great, and perhaps as graceful 
a profusion of compliments and love-making as takes place in 
the most privileged ball-rooms. Yet it is twenty to one that 
nine out of ten persons in the room have dirty stockings on, 
and shoes out at heel. Nobody thinks of saving up articles 
of that description ; and they are too useful, and not showy 
enough, to be cared for en passant. Therefore Italian girls 
may often enough be well compared to flowers ; with head 
and bodies all ornament, their feet are in the earth : and thus 
they go nodding forth for sale, " growing, blowing, and all 
alive." A foolish English servant whom we brought out with 
us, fell into an absolute rage of jealousy at seeing my wife 
give a crown of flowers to a young Italian servant, who was 
going to a dance. The latter, who was of the most respectable 
sort, and looked as lady-like as you please when dressed, 
received the flowers with gratitude, though without surprise ; 
but English and Italian both were struck speechless, when, in 
addition to the crown, my wife presented the latter with a 
pair of her own shoes and stockings. Doubtless, they were 
the triumph of the evening. Next day we heard accounts of 
the beautiful dancing ; — of Signor F., the English valet, open- 

23 



354 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 






ing the ball with the handsome chandler's-shopkeeper, &c; 
and our poor countrywoman was ready to expire. . 

One anti-climax more. If Italy is famous at present for 
any two things, it is for political uneasiness and minestra.* 
Wherever you find shops, you see baskets full of a yellow 
stuff, made up in long stripes like tape, and tied up in bundles. 
This is the main compound of minestra, or, to use the Neapo- 
litan term, it is our now growing acquaintance, maccaroni. 
Much of it is naturally of a yellowish colour, but the Genoese 
dye it deeper with saffron. When made into a soup it is 
called minestra, and mixed sometimes with meat, sometimes 
with oil and butter, but always, if it is to be had, with grated 
cheese. An Italian, reasonably to do in the world, has no 
notion of eating anything plain. If he cannot have his bit of 
roast and boiled, and, above all, his minestra and his oil, he is 
thrown out of all his calculations, physical and moral. He 
has a great abstract respect for fasting ; but he struggles hard 
to be relieved from it. He gets, whenever he can, what is 
called an " indulgence." The Genoese in particular, being 
but Canaanites or borderers in Italy, and accustomed to pro- 
fane intercourse by their maritime situation, as well as to an 
heterodox appetite by their industry and sea air, are extremely 
restive on the subject of fasting. They make pathetic repre- 
sentations to the Archbishop respecting beef and pudding, and 
allege their health and their household economies. Fish is 
luckily dear. I have seen in a Genoese Gazette, an extract 
from the circular of the Archbishop respecting the Lent indul- 
gencies. " The Holiness of our Lord," he says (for so the Pope is 
styled), " has seen with the greatest displeasure, that the ardent 
desire which he has always cherished, of restoring the ancient 
rigour of Lent, is again rendered of no effect by representations 
which he finds it impossible to resist." He therefore permits the 
inhabitants of the Archbishop's diocese to make " one meal a 
day of eggs and white-meats (lattieini) during Lent ; and to 
such persons as have really need of it, he allows the use of 
flesh:" but he adds, that this latter permission " leaves a heavy 
load on his conscience," and that he positively forbids the 
promiscuous use of flesh and fish. I must add, for my part, I 
thought the Pope had reason in this roasting of eggs. 

* I used to think that cicisbeism was its main distinction; but 
young Italy insists that it is going out of fashion ; and, as Italians 
ought to know more about the subject than I do, I shall not let certain 
spectacles that were shown me in their country, pretend to refute it. 



FLORENCE: ITALY IN GENERAL. 355 

As to the political uneasiness, I should have so much to say- 
about it, if I entered upon the subject, that I dare but occa- 
sionally allude to it in this volume. It would require a book 
to itself. The whole of this volume, however, may be said to 
be about it, inasmuch as it concerns the transition state of 
the human mind. I shall advert again to the religious part 
of the subject before I conclude. 

Meantime, I shall only say that Italy is a wonderful nation, 
always at the head of the world in some respect, great or small, 
and equally full of life. Division among its children is its 
bane ; and Mazzini's was the best note that has been struck 
in its favour in modern times, because he struck it at Kome, 
in the place of the very Pope, and thus gave it the best 
chance of rallying under one summons. Heaven forgive the 
French for the shameless vanity of their interference ! for it 
has delayed, under the most unwarrantable circumstances, 
what must assuredly take place before long, as far as priests 
and priestly government are concerned. The poor good Pope 
can no more keep it down, than he could tread out a volcano 
with his embroidered slippers. 

I differ with Mazzini, inasmuch as I prefer a republic 
under a limited monarch, to a republic without one. It seems 
to me to promise better for order and refinement, and for the 
security, against reactions, of progression itself. Still I should 
have rejoiced to see his noble experiment at Rome completed: 
for the throne which he and his compeers occupied, and from 
which, in accordance with his own awful words, he had made 
falsehood descend,* was occupied by justice and reason, and 
infamous was the intervention that broke it up. But if poor, 
divided, and still in great measure (as far as the uneducated 
classes are concerned) priest-ridden Italy is not yet strong 
enough or worthy enough to complete an experiment so noble, 
then the best thing to be desired is, that the gallant king of 
Sardinia should succeed with his constitutional experiment, 
which would end in something far better than absolutism of 
any kind, and might ultimately crown republicanism itself 
with the superior grace and security, of which mention has 
just been made. 

* " You are a lie: Descend ! " — Mazzini to the Papal Power. 



23—2 



356 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

CHAPTEE XXII. 

RETURN TO ENGLAND. 

On our return from Italy to England, we travelled not by 
post, but by vettura, that is to say, by easy stages of thirty or 
forty miles a-day, in a travelling carriage ; the box of which 
is turned into a chaise, with a calash over it. It is drawn by 
three horses, occasionally assisted by mules. We paid about 
eighty-two guineas English, for which some ten of us (count- 
ing as six, because of the children,) were to be taken to 
Calais ; to have a breakfast and dinner every day on the road ; 
to be provided with five beds at night, each containing two 
persons ; and to rest four days during the journey, without 
further expense, in whatever places and portions of time we 
thought fit. Our breakfast was to consist of coffee, bread, 
fruit, milk, and eggs (plenty of each), and our dinner of the 
four indispensable Italian dishes, something roast, something 
boiled, something fried, and what they call an umido, which 
is a hash, or something of that sort ; together with vegetables, 
w r ine, and fruit. Care, however, must be taken in these bar- 
gains, that the vetturino does not crib from the allowance by 
degrees, otherwise the dishes grow fewer and smaller ; meat 
disappears on a religious principle, it being magro day, on 
which " nothing is to be had;" and the vegetables, adhering 
to their friend the meat in his adversity, disappear likewise. 
The reason of this is, that the vetturino has two conflicting 
interests within him. It is his interest to please you in hope 
of other custom ; and it is his interest to make the most of 
the sum of money which his master allows him for expenses. 
Withstand, however, any change at first, and good behaviour 
may be reckoned upon. We had as pleasant a little Tuscan 
to drive us as I ever met with. He began very handsomely ; 
but finding us willing to make the best of any little defici- 
ency, he could not resist the temptation of giving up the 
remoter interest for the nearer one. We found our profusion 
diminish accordingly; and at Turin, after cunningly asking 
us whether we cared to have an inn not of the very highest 
description, he brought us to one, of which it could only be 
said that it was not of the very lowest. The landlord showed 
us into sordid rooms on a second story. I found it necessary 
to be base and make a noise ; upon which little Gigi looked 



RETURN TO ENGLAND. 357 

frightened, and the landlord became slavish, and bowed us into 
his best apartments. We had no more of the same treatment. 
Our rogue of a driver had an excellent temper, and was as 
honest a rogue, I will undertake to say, as ever puzzled a 
formalist. He made us laugh with his resemblance to Lamb, 
whose countenance, a little jovialized, he engrafted upon an 
active little body and sturdy pair of legs, walking about in his 
jack-boots as if they were pumps. But a man must have 
some great object in life, to carry him so many times over 
the Alps: and this, of necessity, is money. We could have 
dispensed easily enough with some of the fried and roasted; 
but to do this would have been to subject ourselves to other 
diminutions. Our bargain was reckoned a good one. Gigi's 
master said (believe him who will) that he could not have 
afforded it, had he not been sure, at that time of the year, 
that somebody would take his coach back again ; such is the 
multitude of persons that come to winter in Italy. 

We were told to look for a barren road from Florence to 
Bologna, but were agreeably disappointed. The vines, indeed, 
and the olives disappeared ; but this was a relief to us. In- 
stead of these, and the comparatively petty ascents about 
Florence, we had proper swelling Apennines, valley and 
mountain, with fine sloping meadows of green, interspersed 
with wood. 

[Starting from Maiano at an early hour on the 10th of 
September, 1825,] we stopped to refresh ourselves at noon at 
an inn called Le Maschere, where there was an elegant pro- 
spect, a mixture of nature with garden ground ; and we slept 
at Covigliaio, where three tall buxom damsels waited upon 
us, who romped during supper with the men-servants. One 
of them had a better tone in speaking than the others, upon 
the strength of which she stepped about with a jaunty air in 
a hat and feathers, and " did the amiable." A Greek came 
in with a long beard, which he poked into all the rooms by 
way of investigation, as he could speak no language but his 
own. I asked one of the girls why she looked so frightened ; 
upon which she shrugged her shoulders and said " Oh Dio!" 
as if Bluebeard had come to put her in his seraglio. 

Our vile inn knocked us up ; and we were half starved. 
Little Gigi, on being remonstrated with, said that he was not 
aware till that moment of its being part of his duty, by the 
agreement, to pay expenses during our days of stopping. He 
had not looked into the agreement till then ! The rogue ! So 



358 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT, 

we lectured him, and forgave him for his good temper ; and 
he was to be very honest and expensive for the rest of the 
journey. 

Next morning we set off at five o'clock, and passed a vol- 
canic part of the Apennines, where a flame issues from the 
ground. We thought we saw it. The place is called Pietra 
Mala (Evil Kock). Here we enter upon the Pope's territories; 
as if his Holiness were to be approached by an infernal door. 

We refreshed at Poggioli, in sight of a church upon a hill, 
called the Monte dei Formicoli (Ant Hill). Sitting outside 
the inn-door on a stone, while the postilion sat on another, he 
told us of an opinion which prevailed among travellers re- 
specting this place. They reported, that on a certain day in 
the year, all the ants in the neighbourhood come to church in 
the middle of the service, and die during the celebration of 
the mass. After giving me this information, I observed him 
glancing at me for some time with a very serious face, after 
which he said abruptly, " Do you believe this report, signore? " 
I told him, that I was loath to differ with what he or any one 
else might think it proper to believe ; but if he put the ques- 
tion to me as one to be sincerely answered — 

" Oh, certainly, signore." 

" Well, then, I do not believe it," 

" No more," said Little Gigi, " do I." 

I subsequently found my postilion very sceptical on some 
highly Catholic points, and he accounted for it like a philo- 
sopher. Seeing that he made no sign of reverence in passing 
the images of the Virgin and Child, I asked him the reason. 

" Sir," said he, " I have travelled." 

These were literally his words. (Ho viaggiato, signore.) 
He manifested, however, no disrespect for opinions on which 
most believers are agreed ; though whenever his horses vexed 
him, he poured forth a series of the most blasphemous 
execrations which I ever heard. Indeed, I had never heard 
any at all resembling them ; though I was told they were not 
uncommon with persons unquestionably devout. He abused 
the Divine presence in the sacrament. He execrated the body 
and but I must not repeat what he said, for fear of shock- 
ing the reader and myself. Nevertheless, I believe he did it 
all in positive innocence and want of thought, repeating the 
words as mere words which he heard from others all his life, 
and to which he attached none of the ideas which they ex- 
pressed. When a person d — ns another in English, he has 



fcETUEN TO ENGLAND. 359 

no real notion of what he condemns him to ; and I believe 
our postilion had as little when he devoted the objects of his 
worship to malediction. He was very kind to the children, 
and took leave of us at the end of our journey in tears. 

The same evening we got to Bologna, where we finished 
for the present with mountains. The best streets in Bologna 
are furnished with arcades, very sensible things, which we 
are surprised to miss in any city in a hot country. They are 
to be found, more or less, as you travel northwards. The 
houses were all kept in good-looking order, owing, I believe, 
to a passion which the Bolognese have for a gorgeous anni- 
versary, against which everything, animate and inanimate, 
puts on its best. I could not learn what it was. Besides 
tapestry and flowers, they bring out their pictures to hang in 
front of the houses. Many cities in Italy disappoint the eye 
of the traveller. The stucco and plaster outside the houses 
get worn, and, together with the open windows, gives them 
a squalid and deserted appearance. But the name is always 
something. If Bologna were nothing of a city, it would still 
be a fine sound and a sentiment ; a thing recorded in art, in 
poetry, in stories of all sorts. 

We passed next day over a flat country, and dined at 
Modena, which is neither so good-looking a city, nor so well 
sounding a recollection, as Bologna; but it is still Modena, 
the native place of Tassoni. I went to the cathedral to get 
sight of the Bucket (La Secchia) which is hung up there, but 
found the doors shut, and a very ugly pile of building. The 
lions before the doors looked as if some giant's children had 
made them in sport ; wretchedly sculptured, and gaped as if 
in agony at their bad legs. It was a disappointment to me 
not to see the Bucket. The poem called the Rape of the 
Bucket (La Secchia Eapita), next to Metastases address to 
Venus, is my oldest Italian acquaintance ; and I reckoned 
upon saying to the subject of it, u Ha, ha ! There you are ! " 
Pope imitated the title of this poem in his Rape of the Lock ; 
and Dryden confessed to a young critic, that he himself knew 
the poem, and had made use of it. The bucket was a trophy 
taken by the Modenese from their rivals of Bologna, during 
one of the petty Italian wars. 

There is something provoking, and yet something fine too, 
in flitting in this manner from city to city. You are vexed at 
not being able to stop and see pictures, &c. ; but you have a 
sort of royal taste of great pleasures in passing. The best 



360 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

thing one can do to get at the interior of anything in this 
hurry, is to watch the countenances of the people. I thought 
that the aspects of the Bolognese and Modenese people singu- 
larly answered to their character in books. What is more 
singular, is the extraordinary difference and nationality of 
aspect in the people of two cities, at so little distance from 
one another. The Bolognese have a broad steady look, not 
without geniality and richness. You can imagine them to 
give birth to painters. The Modenese are crusty -looking and 
carking, with a narrow mouth, and a dry twinkle at the corner 
of the eyes. They are critics and satirists on the face of them. 
For my part, I never took very kindly to Tassoni, for all my 
young acquaintance with him ; and in the war which he has 
celebrated, I was henceforward, whatever I was before, de- 
cidedly for the Bolognese. 

On the 12th of September, after dining at Modena, we slept 
at Eeggio, where Ariosto was born. His father was captain 
of the citadel. Boiardo, the poet's worthy precursor (in some 
respects, I think, his surpasser), was born at Scandiano, not 
far off. I ran, before the gates were shut, to get a look at the 
citadel, and was much the better for not missing it. Poets 
leave a greater charm than any men upon places they have 
rendered famous, because they sympathise more than any other 
men with localities, and identify themselves with the least 
beauty of art or nature — a turret or an old tree. The river 
Ilissus at Athens is found to be a sorry brook ; but it runs 
talking for ever of Plato and Sophocles. 

At Parma I tore my hair mentally at not being able to see 
the Correggios. Piacenza pleased us to be in it, on account of 
the name ; but a list of places in Italy is always like a set of 
musical tones. Parma, Piacenza, Voghera, Tortona, Felizana, 
— sounds like these convert a road-book into a music-book. 

At Asti, a pretty place, with a " west-end" full of fine 
houses, I went to look at the Alfieri palace, and tried to re- 
member the poet with pleasure ; but I could not like him. 
To me, his austerity is only real in the unpleasantest part of 
it. The rest seems affected. The human heart in his hands 
is a tough business ; and he thumps and turns it about in his 
short, violent, and pounding manner, as if it were an iron on 
a blacksmith's anvil. Alfieri loved liberty like a tyrant, and 
the Pretender's widow like a slave. 

The first sight of the Po, of the mulberry-trees, the mea- 
dows, and the Alps, was at once classical, and Italian, and 



RETURN TO ENGLAND. 361 

northern. It made us feel that we were taking a great step 
nearer home. Poirino, a pretty little place, presented us with 
a sight like a passage in Boccaccio. This was a set of Domi- 
nican friars, with the chief at their head, issuing out of two 
coaches, and proceeding along the corridor of the inn to dinner, 
each holding a bottle of wine in his hand, with the exception 
of the abbot, who held two. The wine was doubtless their 
own, that upon the road not being sufficiently orthedox. 

Turin is a noble city, like a set of Regent-streets, made 
twice as tall. We found here some of the most military- 
looking officers we ever saw, fine, tall, handsome fellows, 
whom the weather had beaten but not conquered, very gen- 
tlemanly, and combining the officer and soldier as completely 
as could be wished. They had served under Bonaparte. 
When I saw them, I could understand how it was that a 
Piedmontese revolution was more dreaded by the legitimates 
than any other movement in Italy. The one concocted at 
that time was betrayed by the heir-apparent, then Prince of 
Carignan, who undertook to make amends by his heading 
another, as King Charles Albert. A second was lost not long 
ago. Suspicion still clung to him during the vicissitudes of 
the war ; but a death, looking very much like a broken heart, 
appears to have restored his memory to respect, and his son 
has made great and promising moves in the right direction.* 

* [In this passage there is a very grave mistake, and none the less 
serious for being apparently countenanced by so conscientious a 
writer. The allusion to a betrayal of a liberal movement by Charles 
Albert in his youth, is based on an entirely false report. Charles 
Albert had joined the party of the Carbonari, and had suddenly with- 
drawn from them, but it was on grounds frankly stated, consistent 
with his own professions, and with the avowedly monarchical prin- 
ciples of the present volume. The Carbonari originally formed their 
combination to free their race from tyranny, and to restore Italy to 
the Italians. Charles Albert went with them; but when they enlarged 
their project and planned the establishment of a republic, he declared 
that he could not adopt republican principles, and he withdrew from 
the movement. The movement was defeated, but there is not the 
slightest evidence that Charles Albert, by deed or word, suggestion 
or silence, ever betrayed his former comrades. He afterwards endured 
great trouble of mind and sickness of body from the disappointment 
of his hopes, and, it is understood, doubts whether he was perfectly 
justified in opposing the Church. When opportunity again offered 
itself, Charles Albert again stood forward, and staked his throne in 
the natiooal cause. When he found that his presence embarrassed 
the endeavours of the constitutional party, he spontaneously sur- 
rendered his throne, and doomed himself to die in exile, leaving his 
son, his companion in the field and in council, to carry on the enter- 



362 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

At Turin was the finest dancer I had ever seen, a girl of 
the name of De' Martini. She united the agility of the 
French school with all that you would expect from the Italian. 
Italian dancers are in general as mediocre as the French are 
celebrated ; but the French dancers, in spite of their high 
notions of the art and the severity of their studies (perhaps 
that is the reason), have no mind with their bodies. They 
are busts in barbers' shops, stuck upon legs full of vivacity. 
You wonder how any lower extremities so lively can leave 
such an absence of all expression in the upper. De' Martini 
was a dancer all over. Her countenance partook of the feli- 
city of the limbs. When she came bounding on the stage, in 
two or three long leaps like a fawn, I should have thought 
she was a Frenchwoman ; but the style undeceived me. She 
came bounding in front, as if she would have pitched herself 
into the arms of the pit ; then made a sudden drop, and 
addressed three enthusiastic courtesies to the pit and boxes, 
with a rapidity and yet a grace, a self-abandonment yet a self- 
possession, quite extraordinary, and such as, to do justice to 
it, should be described by a poet combining the western ideas 
of the sex with eastern licence. She was beautiful, too, both 
in face and figure, and I thought was a proper dancer to 
appear before a pit full of those fine fellows I have just men- 
tioned. She seemed as complete in her way as themselves. 
In short, I never saw anything like it before, and did not 
wonder that she had the reputation of turning peoples' heads 
wherever she went. 

At Sant' Ambrogio, a little town between Turinand Susa, 
is a proper castle-topped mountain a la Badcliffe, the only one 
we had met with. Susa has some remains connected with 
Augustus ; but Augustus is nobody, or ought to be nobody, 
to a traveller in modern Italy. He, and twenty like him, 
never gave me one sensation all the time I was there ; and 
even the better part of the Eomans it is difficult to think of. 
There is something formal and cold about their history, in 
spite of Virgil and Horace, and even in spite of their own 
violence, which does not harmonize with the south. They 
are men in northern iron, and their poets, even the best of 
thern, were copiers of the Greek poets, not originals, like 

prise with happier auspices. Charles Albert proved at once the 
bitterness of the sacrifice which he voluntarily incurred and his devo- 
tion to Italy, by ordering on his deathbed that his heart should be 
carried back to the beloved land.] 






RETURN TO ENGLAND. 363 

Dante and Petrarch. So we slept at Susa, not thinking of 
Augustus, but listening to waterfalls, and thinking of the Alps. 

Next morning we beheld a sight worth living for. We were 
now ascending the Alps ; and while yet in the darkness before 
dawn, we beheld the top of one of the mountains basking in 
the sunshine. We took it with delighted reverence into our 
souls, and there it is for ever. The passage of the Alps 
(thanks to Bonaparte, whom a mountaineer, with brightness 
in his eyes, called " Napoleon of happy memory," — Napoleone 
difelice memoria) is now as easy as a road in England. You 
look up towards airy galleries and down upon villages that 
appear like toys, and feel somewhat disappointed at rolling 
over it all so easily. 

The moment we passed the Alps, we found ourselves in 
France. At Lanslebourg, French was spoken, and amorous 
groups gesticulated on the papering and curtains. Savoy is a 
glorious country, a wonderful intermixture of savage preci- 
pices and pastoral meads ; but the roads are still uneven and 
bad. The river ran and tumbled, as if in a race with our 
tumbling carriage. At one time you are in a road like a 
gigantic rut, deep down in a valley ; and at another, up in the 
air, wheeling along a precipice I know not how many times as 
high as St. Paul's. 

At Chambery, I could not resist going to see the house of 
Eousseau and Madame de Warens, while the coach stopped. 
It is up a beautiful lane, where you have trees all the way, 
sloping fields, and a brook ; as fit a scene as could be desired. 
I met some Germans coming away, who congratulated me on 
being bound, as they had been, to the house of " Jean 
Jacques.' ' The house itself is of the humbler genteel class, 
but neat and white, with green blinds. The little chapel, 
that cost its mistress so much, is still remaining. 

We proceeded, through Lyons and Auxerre, to Paris. 
Beyond Lyons, we met on the road the statue of Louis XIV. 
going to that city to overawe it with Bourbon memories. It 
was an equestrian statue, covered up, guarded with soldiers, 
and looking on that road like some mysterious heap. Don 
Quixote would have attacked it, and not been thought mad : 
so much has romance done for us. The natives would in- 
fallibly have looked quietly on. There was a riot about it at 
Lyons, soon after its arrival. I had bought in that city a 
volume of the songs of Beranger, and I thought to myself, as 
I met the statue, " I have a little book in my pocket, which 



364 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

will not suffer you to last long." And, surely enough, down 
it went; for down went King Charles. 

Statues rise and fall; but, a little on the other side of 
Lyons, our postilion exclaimed, "Monte Bianco !" and turn- 
ing round, I beheld, for the first time, Mont Blanc, which 
had been hidden from us, when near it, by a fog. It looked 
like a turret in the sky, amber-coloured, golden, belonging to 
the wall of some ethereal world. This, too, is in our memo- 
ries for ever, — an addition to our stock, — a light for memory 
to turn to, when it wishes a beam upon its face. 

At Paris we could stop but two days, and I had but two 
thoughts in my head ; one of the Eevolution, the other of the 
times of Moliere and Boileau. Accordingly I looked about 
for the Sorbonne, and went to see the place where the guil- 
lotine stood; — the place where thousands of spirits under- 
went the last pang of mortality ; many guilty, many innocent, 
but all the victims of a re-action against tyranny, such as will 
never let tyranny be what it was, unless a convulsion of nature 
should swallow up knowledge, and make the world begin over 
again. These are the thoughts that enable us to bear such 
sights, and that serve to secure what we hope for. 

Paris, besides being a beautiful city in the quarter that 
strangers most look to, the Tuileries, Quai de Voltaire, &c, 
delights the eye of a man of letters by the multitude of its 
book-stalls. There seemed to be a want of old books ; but 
the new were better than the shoal of Missals and Lives of 
the Saints that disappoint the lover of duodecimos on the stalls 
of Italy; and the Rousseaus and Voltaires were endless. I 
thought, if I were a bachelor, not an Englishman, and had 
no love for old friends and fields, and no decided religious 
opinions, I could live very well, for the rest of my life, in a 
lodging above one of the bookseller's shops on the Quai de 
Voltaire, where I should look over the water to the Tuileries, 
and have the Elysian fields in my eye for my evening walk. 

I liked much what little I saw of the French people. They 
are accused of vanity ; and doubtless they have it, and after a 
more obvious fashion than other nations ; but their vanity, at 
least, includes the wish to please ; other people are necessary 
to them ; they are not wrapped up in themselves ; not sulky ; 
not too vain even to tolerate vanity. Their vanity is too 
much confounded with self-satisfaction. There is a good deal 
of touchiness, I suspect, among them — a good deal of ready- 
made heat, prepared to fire up in case the little commerce of 



EETURN TO ENGLAND. 365 

flattery and sweetness is not properly carried on. But this is 
better than ill-temper, or than such egotism as is not to be 
appeased by anything short of subjection. On the other 
hand, there is more melancholy than one could expect, espe- 
cially in old faces. Consciences in the south are frightened 
in their old age, perhaps for nothing. In the north, I suspect, 
they are frightened earlier, perhaps from equal want of know- 
ledge. The worst in France is (at least, from all that I saw), 
that fine old faces are rare. There are multitudes of pretty 
girls ; but the faces of both sexes fall off deplorably as they 
advance in life ; which is not a good symptom. Nor do the 
pretty faces, while they last, appear to contain much depth, 
or sentiment, or firmness of purpose. They seem made like 
their toys, not to last, but to break up. 

Fine faces in Italy are as abundant as cypresses. However, 
in both countries, the inhabitants appeared to us amiable, as 
well as intelligent; and without disparagement to the angel 
faces w T hich you meet with in England, and some of which 
are perhaps finer than any you see anywhere else, I could not 
help thinking, that, as a race of females, the countenances 
both of the French and Italian women announced more 
pleasantness and reasonableness of intercourse, than those of 
my fair and serious countrywomen. The Frenchwoman looked 
as if she wished to please you at any rate, and to be pleased 
herself. She is too conscious ; and her coquetry is said, and 
I believe with truth, to promise more than an Englishman 
would easily find her to perform : but at any rate she thinks 
of you somehow, and is smiling and good-humoured. An 
Italian woman appears to think of nothing, not even of her- 
self. Existence seems enough for her. But she also is easy 
of intercourse, smiling when you speak to her, and very 
unaffected. Now, in simplicity of character the Italian appears 
to me to have the advantage of the English women, and in 
pleasantness of intercourse both Italian and French. "When 
I came to England, after a residence of four years abroad, I 
was grieved at the succession of fair sulky faces which I met 
in the streets of London. They all appeared to come out of 
unhappy homes. In truth, our virtues, or our climate, or 
whatever it is, sit so uneasily upon us, that it is surely worth 
while for our philosophy to inquire whether, in some points 
of moral and political economy, we are not a little mistaken. 
Gipsies will hardly allow us to lay it to the climate. 

It was a blessed moment, nevertheless, when we found our- 



366 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

selves among those dear sulky faces, the countrywomen of 
dearer ones, not sulky. We set out from Calais in the steam- 
boat, which carried us to London, energetically trembling all 
the way under us, as if its burning body partook of the 
fervour of our desire; [arriving on the 14th of October.] 
Here (thought we), in the neighbourhood of London, we are ; 
and may we never be without our old fields again in this 
world, or the old "familiar faces" in this world or in the 
next. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 



AT HOME IN ENGLAND. 



On returning to England, we lived a while at Highgate, where 
I took possession of my old English scenery and my favourite 
haunts, with a delight proportionate to the difference of their 
beauty from that of beautiful Italy. For a true lover of nature 
does not require the contrast of good and bad in order to be 
delighted; he is better pleased with harmonious variety. He 
is content to wander from beauty to beauty, not losing his 
love for the one because he loves the other. A variation on 
a fine theme of music is better still than a good song after a 
bad one. It retains none of the bitterness of fault-finding. 

I used to think in Italy that I was tired of vines and olives, 
and the sharp outlines of things against indigo skies ; and so 
I was ; but it was from old love, and not from new hatred. 
I humoured my dislike because I knew it was ill-founded. I 
always loved the scenery at heart, as the cousin-german of all 
other lovely scenery, especially of that which delighted me in 
books. 

But in England I was at home ; and in English scenery I 
found my old friend " pastoral " still more pastoral. It was 
like a breakfast of milk and cream after yesterday's wine. 
The word itself was more verified : for pastoral comes from 
pasture ; it implies cattle feeding, rather than vines growing, 
or even goats browsing on their tops ; and here they were in 
plenty, very different from the stall-fed and rarely seen cattle 
of Tuscany. The country around was almost all pasture ; 
and beloved Hampstead was near, with home in its church- 



AT HOME IN ENGLAND. 367 

yard as well as in its meadows. Again I wandered with 
transport through 

" Each alley green, 
And every bosky bourn from side to side, — 
My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood." 

Only for " bosky bourn " you must read the ponds in which 
Shelley used to sail his boats, and very little brooks unknown 
to all but the eyes of their lovers. The walk across the fields 
from Highgate to Hampstead, with ponds on one side, and 
Caen Wood on the other, used to be (and I hope is still, for 
I have not seen it for some years) one of the prettiest of 
England. Poets' (vulgarly called Millfield) Lane crossed it 
on the side next Highgate, at the foot of a beautiful slope, 
which in June was covered with daisies and buttercups ; and 
at the other end it descended charmingly into the Vale of 
Health, out of which rose the highest ground in Hampstead. 
It was in this spot, and in relation to it and about this time 
(if I may quote my own verses in illustration of what I felt), 
that I wrote some lines to " Gipsy June," apostrophizing that 
brown and happy month on the delights which I found again 
in my native country, and on the wrongs done him by the 
pretension of the month of May. 



"May, the jade, with her fresh cheek, 
And the love the bards bespeak, — 
May, by coming first in sight, 
Half defrauds thee of thy right, 
Eor her best is shared by thee 
With a wealthier potency; 
So that thou dost bring us in 
A sort of May-time masculine, 
Eit for action or for rest, 
As the luxury seems the best, — 
Bearding now the morning breeze, 
Or in love with paths of trees, 
Or disposed full length to lie, 
With a hand-enshaded eye, 
On thy warm and golden slopes, 
Basker in the buttercups; 
List'ning with nice distant ears 
To the shepherd's clapping shears, 
Or the next field's laughing play 
In the happy wars of hay, 
While its perfume breathes all over, 
Or the bean comes fine, or clover. 



368 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. 

" Oh ! could I walk round the earth 
With a heart to share my mirth, 
With a look to love me ever, 
Thoughtful much, but sullen never, 
I could be content to see 
June and no variety, 
Loitering here, and living there, 
With a book and frugal fare, 
With a finer gipsy time, 
And a cuckoo in the clime, 
Work at morn and mirth at noon, 
And sleep beneath the sacred moon." 

No offence, nevertheless, as John Buncle would have said, 
to the " stationary domesticities." For fancy takes old habits 
along with it in new shapes; domesticity itself can travel; 
and I never desired any better heaven, in this world or the 
next, than the old earth of my acquaintance put in its finest 
condition, my own nature being improved, of course, along 
with it. I have often envied the household waggon that one 
meets with in sequestered lanes — a cottage on wheels — mov- 
ing whithersoever it pleases, and halting for as long a time as 
may suit it. So, at least, one fancies; ignoring all about 
parish objections, inconvenient neighbourhoods, and want of 
harmony in the vehicle itself. The pleasantest idea which I 
can conceive of this world, as far as oneself and one's enjoy- 
ments are concerned, is to possess some favourite home in 
one's native country, and then travel over all the rest of the 
globe with those whom we love; always being able to return, 
if we please ; and ever meeting with new objects, as long as 
we choose to stay away. And I suppose this is what the in- 
habitants of the world will come to, when they have arrived 
at years of discretion, and railroads will have hastened the 
maturity.* 

I seemed more at home in England, even with Arcadian 
idealisms, than I had been in the land nearer their birth-place; 
for it was in England I first found them in books, and with 
England even my Italian books were more associated than 

* " There is a flock of pigeons at Maiano, which, as they go careering 
in and out among the olive-trees, look like the gentle spirits of the 
Decameron again assembled in another shape. Alas ! admire all this 
as I may, and thankful as I am, I would quit it all for a walk over 
the fields from Hampstead, to one or two houses I could mention. 
My imagination can travel a good way; but, like the Tartar, it must 
carry its tents along with it. New pleasures must have old warrants. 
I can gain much, but I can afford to lose nothing," — Notes to Bacchus 
in Tuscany j p. 174. 



AT HOME IN ENGLAND. 369 

with Italy itself. When in prison, I had bought the collection 
of poetry called the Parnaso Italiano, a work in fifty-six duo- 
decimo volumes, adorned with vignettes. The bookseller, by 
the way, charged me thirty pounds for it; though I could 
have got it, had I been wise, for a third part of the sum, 
albeit it was neatly bound. But I thought it cheap ; and 
jojfully got rid of my thirty pounds for such a southern 
treasure ; which, I must own, has repaid me a million times 
over, in the pleasure I have received from it. In prison it 
was truly a lump of sunshine on my shelves; and I have 
never since been without it. I even took it with me to its 
native land. 

This book aided Spenser himself in filling my English 
walks with visions of gods and nymphs — of enchantresses and 
magicians ; for the reader might be surprised to know to what 
a literal extent such was the case. I suspect I had far more 
sights of " Proteus coming from the sea," than Mr. Words- 
worth himself ; for he desired them only in despair of getting 
anything better out of the matter-of-fact state of the world 
about him; whereas, the world had never been able to de- 
prive me, either of the best hopes for itself, or of any kind 
of vision, sacred or profane, which I thought suitable to 
heaven or earth. I saw fairies in every wood, as I did the 
advent of a nobler Christianity in the churches ; and by the 
help of the beautiful universality which books had taught me, 
I found those two classes of things not less compatible than 
Chaucer and Boccaccio did, when they talked of " Holy 
Ovid," and invoked the saints and the gods in the same exor- 
dium. I found even a respectful corner in my imagination for 
those poetical grown children in Italy, who (literally) played 
at " Arcadians " in gardens made for the purpose, and 
assumed names from imaginary farms in old Greece. The 
" bays" upon poets' heads in old books had prepared me, 
when a boy, to like that image of literary success. I had 
myself played at it in dedications and household pastimes ; 
and the names of Filicaia, Menzini, Guidi, and other grave 
and classical Italian poets, who had joined the masquerade in 
good faith, completed my willingness not to disesteem it. 

The meaning of all this is, that at the time of my life in 
question, I know not in which I took more delight — the actual 
fields and woods of my native country, the talk of such things 
in books, or the belief which I entertained that I should one 
day be joined in remembrance with those who had talked it. 

24 



370 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

I used to stroll about the meadows half the day, with a book 
under my arm, generally a " Parnaso " or a Spenser, and won- 
der that I met nobody who seemed to like the fields as I did. 
The jests about Londoners and Cockneys did not affect me in 
the least, as far as my faith was concerned. They might as 
well have said that Hampstead was not beautiful, or Eich- 
mond lovely ; or that Chaucer and Milton were Cockneys 
when they went out of London to lie on the grass and look at 
the daisies. The Cockney school of poetry is the most illus- 
trious in England; for, to say nothing of Pope and Gray, who 
were both veritable Cockneys, " born within the sound of 
Bow Bell," Milton was so too; and Chaucer and Spenser were 
both natives of the city. Of the four greatest English poets, 
Shakspeare only was not a Londoner. 

But the charge of Cockneyism frightened the booksellers. 
I could never understand till this moment, what it was, for 
instance, that made the editor of a magazine reject an article 
which I wrote, with the mock-heroical title of The Graces and 
Anxieties of Pig Driving. I used to think he found some- 
thing vulgar in the title. He declared that it was not he who 
rejected it, but the proprietor of the magazine. The pro- 
prietor, on the other hand, declared that it was not he who 
rejected it, but the editor. I published it in a magazine 
of my own, the Companion, and found it hailed as one of my 
best pieces of writing. But the subject was a man inducting 
a pig into Smithfield through the intricacies of Cockney lanes 
and alleys; and the names of Smithfield, and Barbican, and 
Bell-alley, and Ducking Pond-row, were not to be ventured 
in the teeth of my friends the Tories under the signature of 
the quondam editor of the Examiner. I subsequently wrote 
a fictitious autobiography, of which I shall speak presently, 
under the title of Sir Ralph Esher. It was republished the 
other day with my name to it for the first time. The pub- 
lisher in those days of Toryism and Tory jesting would not 
venture to print it. I was at length irritated by misrepresen- 
tations on the subject of Lord Byron to publish some auto- 
biographical accounts of myself, and a refutation of matters 
relating to his lordship ; and to this book, for obvious reasons, 
my name was suffered to be attached ; but this only made 
matters worse ; and it is inconceivable to what extent I suf- 
fered, in mind, body, and estate, because the tide of affairs 
was against me, and because the public (which is not the best 
trait in their character) are inclined to believe whatever is 



AT HOME IN EXGLAXD. 371 

said of a man by the prosperous. I have since been lauded 
to the skies, on no other account, for productions which at 
that period fell dead from the press. People have thought I 
wrote them yesterday; and I have sometimes been at once 
mystified and relieved, to observe who the persons were that 
have so praised them, and what they have omitted to notice 
for no better reason. It is said, and I believe truly, that no 
man in the long run can be written down, or up, except by 
himself; but it is painful to think how much can be done to 
both purposes in the meantime, and for those who deserve 
neither the one nor the other. A secret history of criticism, 
for some twenty years at a time, with its favouritisms, its 
animosities, and its hesitations, would make a very curious 
book; but the subject would be so disagreeable, that it would 
require almost as disagreeable a person to write it. 

But adieu to records of this kind for ever. It is not possi- 
ble for many persons to have had greater friends than I have. 
I am not aware that I have now a single enemy ; and I accept 
the fortunes which have occurred to me, bad and good, with 
the same disposition to believe them the best that could have 
happened, whether for the correction of what was wrong in 
me, or the improvement of what was right. 

I struggled successfully with this state of things, as long as 
their causes lasted. It was not till Toryism began its declension 
with the rise of Louis Philippe, and the small stock of readers 
who never left me was increasing, that the consequences of 
what I had battled with, forced me almost to drop the pen for 
some years. I had never lost cheerfulness of tone, for I had 
never ceased to be cheerful in my opinions. I had now rea- 
son to be more hopeful than ever ; but the wounds resulting 
from a long conflict, my old ignorance of business, and that 
very tendency to reap pleasure from every object in creation, 
which at once reconciled me to loss, retained me my few 
readers, and hindered me from competing with the more 
prudential lessons of writers who addressed the then state of 
society, conspired to set me at the mercy of wants and cre- 
ditors. The ailment from which I suffered in Italy returned 
with double force ; and I know not what would have happened 
to me for some time, short of what temperance and my 
opinions rendered impossible, if friends, with a delicacy as 
well as generosity which I have never been able to thank suf- 
ficiently to this day (for the names of some with whom I was 
not conversant eluded my gratitude) had not supplied the de- 

24—2 



372 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

fects of fortune. Ought I to blush for stating my obligations 
thus publicly ? I do, if it be held fit that I should ; for I am 
loth not to do what is expected of me, even by a respectable 
prejudice, when it is on the side of delicacy and self-respect. 
But far more, I conceive, should I have reason to blush, and 
upon those very accounts, first, if I could not dare to distin- 
guish between an ordinary and an exceptional case; and 
secondly, and most of all, if I could not subordinate a pre- 
judice, however respectable, to the first principles of social 
esteem, and justify by my gratitude the sympathies which my 
writings had excited. 

The little periodical work to which I have alluded — the 
Companion — consisted partly of criticisms on theatres, authors, 
and public events, and partly of a series of essays in the 
manner of the Indicator. Some of the essays have since 
accompanied the republications of that older work. They 
contained some of what afterwards turned out to be my 
most popular writing. But I had no money to advertise the 
publication ; it did not address itself to any existing influence ; 
and in little more than half a year I was forced to bring it to 
a conclusion. 

The Companion was written at Highgate ; but the opening 
of the court scenes in Sir Ralph Esher was suggested by the 
locality of Epsom, to which place we had removed, and which 
saw the termination of what it had commenced. 

Those who are not acquainted with the work, may be told 
that it is the fictitious autobiography of a gentleman of the 
court of Charles the Second, including the adventures of 
another, and notices of Cromwell, the Puritans, and the 
Catholics. It was given to the world anonymously, and, not- 
withstanding my wishes to the contrary, as a novel ; but the 
publisher pleaded hard for the desirableness of so doing ; and as 
he was a good-natured man, and had liberally enabled me to 
come from Italy, I could not say Nay. It is not destitute of 
adventure ; and I took a world of pains to make it true to the 
times which it pictured; but whatever interest it may possess 
is so entirely owing, I conceive, to a certain reflecting exhi- 
bition of character, and to fac-simile imitations of the courts 
of Charles and Cromwell, that I can never present it to 
my mind in any other light than that of a veritable set of 
memoirs. 

The reader may judge of the circumstances under which 
authors sometimes write, when I tell him that the publisher 



AT HOME IN ENGLAND. 373 

had entered into no regular agreement respecting this work ; 
that he could decline receiving any more of it whenever it 
might please him to do so ; that I had nothing else at the time 
to depend on for my family; that I was in very bad health, 
never writing a page that did not put my nerves into a state 
of excessive sensibility, starting at every sound ; and that 
whenever I sent the copy up to London for payment, which 
I did every Saturday, I always expected, till I got a good way 
into the work, that he would ' send me word he had had 
enough. I waxed and waned in spirits accordingly, as the 
weeks opened and terminated; now being as full of them as 
my hero Sir Ealph, and now as much otherwise as his friend 
Sir Philip Heme ; and these two extremes of mirth and 
melancholy, and the analogous thoughts which they fed, made 
a strange kind of harmony with the characters themselves ; 
which characters, by the way, were wholly fictitious, and 
probably suggested by the circumstance. Merry or melan- 
choly, my nerves equally suffered by the tensity occasioned 
them in composition. I could never (and I seldom ever could, 
or can) write a few hundred words without a certain degree 
of emotion, which in a little while suspends the breath, then 
produces a flushing in the face, and, if persevered in, makes 
me wake up, when I have finished, in a sort of surprise at 
the objects around me, and a necessity of composing myself by 
patience and exercise. When the health is at its worst, a 
dread is thus apt to be produced at the idea of recommencing ; 
and work is delayed, only to aggravate the result. I have 
often tried, and sometimes been forced to write only a very 
little while at a time, and so escape the accumulation of ex- 
citement; but it is very difficult to do this; for you forget 
the intention in the excitement itself; and when you call it to 
mind, you continue writing, in the hope of concluding the 
task for the day. A few months ago, when I had occasion to 
look at Sir Ealph Esher again, after some lapse of time, I 
was not a little pleased to find how glibly and at their ease 
the words appeared to run on, as though I had suffered no 
more in writing it than Sir Ealph himself. But thus it is 
with authors who are in earnest. The propriety of what they 
are saying becomes a matter of as much nervous interest to 
them, as any other exciting cause ; and I believe, that if a 
writer of this kind were summoned away from his work to be 
taken to the scaffold, he would not willingly leave his last 
sentence in erroneous condition. 



374 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

The reader may be surprised to hear, after these remarks, 
that what I write with the greatest composure is verses. He 
may smile, and say that he does not wonder, since the more 
art the less nature, or the more artificiality the less earnest- 
ness. But it is not that ; it is that I write verses only when 
I most like to write; that I write them slowly, with loving 
recurrence, and that the musical form is a perpetual solace 
and refreshment. The earnestness is not the less. In one 
respect it is greater, for it is more concentrated. It is forced, 
by a sweet necessity, to say more things in less compass. 
But then the necessity is sweet. The mode, and the sense of 
being able to meet its requirements, in however comparative 
a degree, are more than a sustainment: they are a charm. 
This is the reason why poetry, not of the highest order, is 
sometimes found so acceptable. The author feels so much 
happiness in his task, that he cannot but convey happiness to 
his reader. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 



LITERARY PROJECTS. 



We left Epsom to return to the neighbourhood of London, 
which was ever the natural abiding-place of men of letters, 
till railroads enlarged their bounds. We found a house in a 
sequestered corner of Old Brompton, and a landlord in the 
person of my friend Charles Knight, with whom an intercourse 
commenced, which I believe has been a pleasure on both sides. 
I am sure it has been a good to myself. If I had not a reve- 
rence of a peculiar sort for the inevitable past, I could wish 
that I had begun writing for Mr. Knight immediately, instead 
of attempting to set up another periodical work of my own, 
without either means to promulgate it, or health to render 
the failure of little consequence. I speak of a literary and 
theatrical paper called the Tatler, set up in 1830. It was a 
very little work, consisting but of four folio pages ; but it was 
a daily publication: I did it all myself, except when too ill; 
and illness seldom hindered me either from supplying the 
review of a book, going every night to the play, or writing 
the notice of the play the same night at the printing-office. 
The consequence was, that the work, slight as it looked, nearly 
killed me ; for it never prospered beyond the coterie of play- 



LITERARY PROJECTS. 375 

going readers, to whom it was almost exclusively known; and 
I was sensible of becoming weaker and poorer every day. 
When I came home at night, often at morning, I used to feel 
as if I could hardly speak ; and for a year and a half after- 
wards, a certain grain of fatigue seemed to pervade my limbs, 
which I thought would never go off. Such, nevertheless, is a 
habit of the mind, if it but be cultivated, that my spirits 
never seemed better, nor did I ever write theatricals so well, 
as in the pages of this most unremunerating speculation. 

I had attempted, just before, to set up a little work called 
Chat of the Week; which was to talk, without scandal, of 
anything worth public notice. The Government put a stop 
to this speculation by insisting that it should have a stamp; 
which I could not afford. I was very angry, and tilted against 
governments, and aristocracies, and kings and princes in 
general ; always excepting King William, for whom I had 
regard as a reformer, and Louis Philippe, whom I fancied to 
be a philosopher. I also got out of patience with my old 
antagonists the Tories, to whom I resolved to give as good as 
they brought; and I did so, and stopped every new assailant. 
A daily paper, however small, is a weapon that gives an 
immense advantage ; you can make your attacks in it so often. 
However, I always ceased as soon as my antagonists did. 

In a year or two after the cessation of the Tatler [t. e. in 
1833], my collected verses were published by subscription; 
and as a reaction by this time had taken place in favour of 
political and other progress, and the honest portion of its 
opponents had not been unwilling to discover the honesty of 
those with whom they differed, a very handsome list of sub- 
scribers appeared in the Times newspaper, comprising names 
of all shades of opinion, some of my sharpest personal anta- 
gonists not excepted. 

In this edition of my Poetical Works is to be found the 
only printed copy of a poem, the title of which {The Gentle 
Armour) has been a puzzle for guessers. It originated in 
curious notions of delicacy. The poem is founded on one of 
the French fabliaux, Les Trois Chevaliers et la Chemise. It 
is the story of a knight, who, to free himself from the impu- 
tation of cowardice, fights against three other knights in no 
stouter armour than a lady's garment thus indicated. The 
late Mr. Way, who first introduced the story to the British 
public, and who was as respectable and conventional a gentle- 
man, I believe, in every point of view, as could be desired, 



376 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

had no hesitation, some years ago, in rendering the French 
title of the poem by its (then) corresponding English words, 
The Three Knights and the Smock; but so rapid are the 
changes that take place in people's notions of what is decorous, 
that not only has the word " smock" (of which it was impos- 
sible to see the indelicacy, till people were determined to find 
it) been displaced since that time by the word " shift ;" but 
even that harmless expression for the act of changing one 
garment for another, has been set aside in favour of the French 
word " chemise ;" and at length not even this word, it seems, 
is to be mentioned, nor the garment itself alluded to, by any 
decent writer ! Such, at least, appears to have been the 
dictum of some customer, or customers, of the bookseller who 
published the poem. The title was altered to please these 
gentlemen ; and in a subsequent edition of the Works, the 
poem itself was withdrawn from their virgin eyes. 

The terrible original title was the Battle of the Shift; and 
a more truly delicate story, I will venture to affirm, never was 
written. Charles Lamb thought the new title unworthy of 
its refinement, " because it seemed ashamed of the right one." 
He preferred the honest old word. But this was the author 
of Rosamond Gray. 

We had found that the clay soil of St. John's Wood did 
not agree with us. Or, perhaps, it was only the melancholy 
state of our fortune : for the New Eoad, to which we again 
returned, agreed with us as little. It was there that I thought 
I should have died, in consequence of the long fatigue which 
succeeded the working of the Tatler. 

While in this quarter I received an invitation to write in 
the new evening paper called The True Sun. I did so ; but 
nothing of what I wrote has survived, I believe ; nor can I 
meet with the paper anywhere, to ascertain. Perhaps an 
essay or two originated in its pages, to which I cannot trace 
it. I was obliged for some time to be carried every morning 
to the True Sun office in a hackney-coach. I there became 
intimate with Laman Blanchard, whose death [about ten years 
back] was such a grief and astonishment to his friends. They 
had associated anything but such end with his witty, joyous, 
loving, and beloved nature. But the watch was over-wound, 
and it ran suddenly down. What bright eyes he had ! and 
what a kindly smile ! How happy he looked when he 
thought you were happy; or when he was admiring some- 
body; or relating some happy story! If suicide, bad as it 



LITERARY PROJECTS. 377 

often is, and full of recklessness and resentment, had not been 
rescued from indiscriminate opprobrium, Laman Blanchard 
alone should have rescued it. I never think of him without 
feeling additional scorn for the hell of the scorner Dante, 
who has put all suicides into his truly infernal regions, both 
those who were unjust to others, and those who were unjust 
only to themselves.* 

From the noise and dust of the New Road, my family 
removed to a corner in Chelsea, where the air of the neigh- 
bouring river was so refreshing, and the quiet of the " no- 
thoroughfare " so full of repose, that although our fortunes were 
at their worst, and my health almost of a piece with them, I felt 
for some weeks as if I could sit still for ever, embalmed in the 
silence. I got to like the very cries in the street, for making 
me the more aware of it by the contrast. I fancied they were 
unlike the cries in other quarters of the suburbs, and that they 
retained something of the old quaintness and melodiousness 
which procured them the reputation of having been composed 
by Purcell and others. Nor is this unlikely, when it is con- 
sidered how fond those masters were of sporting with their art, 
and setting the most trivial words to music in their glees and 
catches. The primitive cries of cowslips, primroses, and hot 
cross-buns seemed never to have quitted this sequestered 
region. They were like daisies in a bit of surviving field. 
There was an old seller of fish, in particular, whose cry of 
" shrimps as large as prawns," was such a regular, long-drawn, 
and truly pleasing melody, that in spite of his hoarse and, I 
am afraid, drunken voice, I used to wish for it of an evening, 
and hail it when it came. It lasted for some years ; then 
faded, and went out ; I suppose, with the poor old weather- 
beaten fellow's existence. 

This sense of quiet and repose may have been increased by 
an early association of Chelsea with something out of the 
pale ; nay, remote. It may seem strange to hear a man who 
has crossed the Alps talk of one suburb as being remote from 
another. But the sense of distance is not in space only ; it is 
in difference and discontinuance. A little back-room in a 
street in London is farther removed from the noise, than a 
front room in a country town. In childhood, the farthest 
local point which I reached anywhere, provided it was quiet, 

* See the speech of the good Piero delle Vigne, who was driven to 
kill himself by the envy of those that hated him for fidelity to his 
master. — Inferno, canto xiii. 



378 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

always seemed to me a sort of end of the world; and I 
remembered particularly feeling this, the only time when I 
had previously visited Chelsea, which was at that period of 
life. So the green rails of the gardens in Paddington seemed 
as remote as if they were a thousand miles off. They repre- 
sented all green rails and all gardens, at whatever distance. 
I have a lively recollection, when a little boy, of having been 
with my mother one day walking out by Mile End, where 
there was a mound covering the remains of people who died 
in the Plague. The weather had been rainy ; and there was 
a heavy mud in the road, rich with the colour of brown (I 
suppose Mr. West had put his thought in my head of finding- 
colour in mud. Whoever it was, he did me a great deal of 
good). I remember to the present day looking at this rich 
mud colour and admiring it, and seeing the great broad wheels 
of some waggons go through it, and thinking awfully of the 
mound, and the plague, and the dead people ; always feeling 
at the same time the delight of being abroad with my mother, 
with whom I could have walked through any peril, to say 
nothing of so many strange satisfactions. Now, this region 
also looked the remotest in the world. Even the name of 
" Mile End " had to do with the impression ; for it seemed to 
be, not the end of one mile, but of many ; the end of miles 
in general; of all miles. Measurement itself terminated at 
that spot. What there was beyond it, I did not conjecture. 

I know not whether the corner I speak of remains as quiet 
as it was. I am afraid not; for steamboats have carried vicis- 
situde into Chelsea, and Belgravia threatens it with her mighty 
advent. But to complete my sense of repose and distance, 
the house was of that old-fashioned sort which I have always 
loved best, familiar to the eyes of my parents, and associated 
with childhood. It had seats in the windows, a small third 
room on the first floor, of which I made a sanctum, into which 
no perturbation was to enter, except to calm itself with reli- 
gious and cheerful thoughts (a room thus appropriated in a 
house appears to me an excellent thing); and there were 
a few lime-trees in front, which, in their due season diffused a 
fragrance. 

In this house we remained seven years ; in the course of 
which, besides contributing some articles to the Edinburgh and 
Westminster Reviews, and producing a good deal of the book 
since called The Toivn,! set up [in 1834] the London Journal, 
endeavoured to continue the Monthly Repository, and wrote 



LITERARY PROJECTS. 379 

the poem entitled Captain Sword and Captain Pen, the Legend 
of Florence, and three other plays -which are yet unpublished. 
Here, also, I became acquainted with Thomas Carlyle, one of 
the kindest and best, as well as most eloquent of men; though 
in his zeal for what is best he sometimes thinks it incumbent 
on him to take not the kindest tone, and in his eloquent de- 
mands of some hearty uncompromising creed on our parts, he 
does not quite set the example of telling us the amount of 
his own. Mr. Carlyle sees that there is a good deal of rough 
work in the operations of nature : he seems to think himself 
bound to consider a good deal of it devilish, after the old 
Covenanter fashion, in order that he may find something 
angelical in giving it the proper quantity of vituperation and 
blows ; and he calls upon us to prove our energies and our 
benevolence by acting the part of the wind rather than the 
sun, of warring rather than peace-making, of frightening and 
forcing rather than conciliating and persuading. Others re- 
gard this view of the one thing needful, however strikingly 
set forth, as an old and obsolete story, fit only to be finally 
done with, and not worth the repetition of the old series of 
reactions, even for the sake of those analogies with the physical 
economy of the world, which, in the impulse which nature 
herself gives us towards progression, we are not bound to 
suppose everlastingly applicable to its moral and spiritual 
development. If mankind are destined never to arrive at 
years of discretion, the admonition is equally well-founded 
and unnecessary ; for the old strifes will be continued at all 
events, the admonition (at best) being a part of them. And 
even then, I should say that the world is still a fine, rich, 
strenuous, beautiful, and desirable thing, always excepting 
the poverty that starves, and one or two other evils which on 
no account must we consent to suppose irremediable. But if 
the case be otherwise, if the hopes which nature herself has 
put into our hearts be something better than incitements to 
hopeless action, merely for the action's sake, and this beautiful 
planet be destined to work itself into such a condition as we 
feel to be the only fit condition for that beauty, then, I say, 
with every possible respect for my admirable friend, who can 
never speak but he is worth hearing, that the tale which he 
condescends to tell is no better than our old nursery figment 
of the Black Man and the Coal-hole, and that the growing 
desire of mankind for the cessation of bitterness, and for the 
prevalence of the sweets of gentleness and persuasion, is an 



380 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

evidence that the time has arrived for dropping the thorns 
and husks of the old sourness and austerity, and showing 
ourselves worthy of " the goods the gods provide us." 

Mr. Carlyle's antipathy to " shams,'' is highly estimable and 
salutary. I wish Heaven may prosper his denouncements of 
them, wherever they exist. But the danger of the habit of 
denouncing — of looking at things from the antipathetic instead 
of the sympathetic side — is, that a man gets such a love for 
the pleasure and exaltation of fault-finding, as tempts him, 
in spite of himself, to make what he finds; till at length he is 
himself charged with being a " sham;" that is to say, a pre- 
tender to perceptions and virtues which he does not prove, or 
at best a willing confounder of what differs from modes and 
appearances of his own, with violations of intrinsical wisdom 
and goodness. Upon this principle of judgment, nature 
herself and the universe might be found fault with; and the 
sun and the stars denounced for appearing no bigger than they 
do, or for not confining the measure of their operation to that 
of the taper we read by. Mr. Carlyle adopted a peculiar 
semi-German style, from the desire of putting thoughts on 
his paper instead of words, and perhaps of saving himself 
some trouble in the process. I feel certain that he does it 
from no other motive ; and I am sure he has a right to help 
himself to eveiy diminution of trouble, seeing how many 
thoughts and feelings he undergoes. He also strikes an 
additional blow with the peculiarity, rouses men's attention 
by it, and helps his rare and powerful understanding to pro- 
duce double its effect. It would be hard not to dispense with 
a few verbs and nominative cases, in consideration of so great 
a result. Yet, if we were to judge him by one of his own 
summary processes, and deny him the benefit of his notions 
of what is expedient and advisable, how could he exculpate 
this style, in which he denounces so many " shams," of being 
itself a sham? of being affected, unnecessary, and ostentatious? 
a jargon got up to confound pretension with performance, and 
reproduce endless German talk under the guise of novelty ? 

Thus much in behalf of us dulcet signors of philanthropy, 
and conceders of good intention, whom Mr. Carlyle is always 
girding at, and who beg leave to say that they have not con- 
lined their lives to words, any more than the utterers of words 
more potential, but have had their " actions " too, and their 
sufferings, and even their thoughts, and have seen the faces 
of the gods of wonder and melancholy ; albeit they end with 



LITERARY PROJECTS. 381 

believing them to be phantoms (however useful) of bad health, 
and think nothing finally potential but gentleness and per- 
suasion. 

It has been well said, that love money as people may, there 
is generally something which they love better: some whim, 
or hobby-horse; some enjoyment or recreation; some personal, 
or political, or poetical predilection ; some good opinion of 
this or that class of men ; some club of one's fellows, or 
dictum of one's own; — with a thousand other somes and pro- 
babilities. I believe that what Mr. Carlyle loves better than 
his fault-finding, with all its eloquence, is the face of any 
human creature that looks suffering, and loving, and sincere; 
and I believe further, that if the fellow-creature were suffering 
only, and neither loving nor sincere, but had come to a pass 
of agony in this life, which put him at the mercies of some 
good man for some last help and consolation towards his grave, 
even at the risk of loss to repute, and a sure amount of pain 
and vexation, that man, if the groan reached him in its for- 
lornness, would be Thomas Carlyle. 

The London Journal was a miscellany of essays, criticism, 
and passages from books. Towards the close, it was joined 
by the Printing Machine, but the note which it had struck 
was of too aesthetical a nature for cheap readers in those days ; 
and [in 1836], after attaining the size of a goodly folio double 
volume, it terminated. I have since had the pleasure of 
seeing the major part of the essays renew their life, and 
become accepted by the public, in a companion volume to the 
Indicator, entitled the Seer. But the reputation, as usual, 
was too late for the profit. Neither the Seer nor the Indicator 
are mine. — The Seer does not mean a prophet, or one gifted 
with second sight, but an observer of ordinary things about 
him, gifted by his admiration of nature with the power of 
discerning what everybody else may discern by a cultivation 
of the like secret of satisfaction. I have been also pleased to 
see that the London Journal maintains a good, steady price 
with my old friends, the bookstalls. It is in request, I under- 
stand, as a book for sea-voyages; and assuredly its large, 
triple-columned, eight hundred pages, full of cheerful ethics, 
of reviews, anecdotes, legends, table-talk, and romances of 
real life, make a reasonable sort of library for a voyage, and 
must look pleasant enough, lying among the bulky things 
upon deck. The Romances of Real Life were, themselves, 
collected into a separate, volume. They contain the best 



382 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

things out of the Lounger's Common-Place Book, and other 
curious publications, with the addition of comments by the 
editor. These romances are as little my property as the books 
of essays just mentioned : but I venture to think that they 
are worth recommending for their own sakes, and that the 
comments contain some of my best reflections. 

Alas ! whither am I going, thus talking about myself? 
But I must finish what I have got so far with. 

Among the contiibutors to the London Journal was a 
young friend, who, had he lived, would have been a very 
distinguished man. I allude to Egerton Webbe, a name well 
known in private circles of wit and scholarship. He was 
a wit of the first water, a scholar writing elegant Latin verse, 
a writer of the best English style, having philological reason 
for every word he uttered — a reasoner, a humorist, a poli- 
tician, a cosmopolite, a good friend, brother, and son; and to 
add a new variety to all this, he inherited from his grand- 
father, the . celebrated glee composer, a genius for musical 
composition, which in his person took a higher and wider 
range, being equally adapted for pathos and comedy. He 
wrote a most humorous farce, both words and music ; and he 
was the author of a strain of instrumental music in the 
funeral scene of the Legend of Florence, which was taken by 
accomplished ears for a dirge of some Italian master. 

Unfortunately, like Beethoven, he was deaf ; but so delight- 
ful was his conversation, that I was glad to strain my voice 
for it the whole evening to such an extent, that, on his de- 
parture, my head would run round with dizziness, and I could 
not go to sleep. 

Had he lived, he would have enriched a family too good 
and trusting for the ordinary course of the world. He died ; 
and their hopes and their elder lives went with him, till they 
all meet somewhere again. Dear Egerton "Webbe ! How 
astonished was Edward Holmes, the best musical critic which 
this nation has produced, to see him come into his house with 
his young and blooming face, after reading essays and meta- 
physics, which he took for those of some accomplished old 
gentleman ! 

I would not do my friend's memory such disservice as to 
give the following jeux oV esprit by way of specimens of his 
powers. They are samples only of his pastime and trifling. 
But I fear, that such entertainment as my book may contain 
has been growing less and less ; and I put them in, that he 



LITERARY PROJECTS. 383 

may still do for me what he has done before — give my jaded 
spirits a lift. 

Scholarly readers know Martial well enough ; and therefore 
they know, that in pouring forth everything which came into 
his head, bad and good, he is sometimes bad indeed. He 
realizes his own jest about the would-be sly fellow, who, in 
order not to be thought poor, pretended a voluntary appear- 
ance of poverty. Martial, on these occasions, utters his no- 
things with an air as if they were something on that very 
account ; as if they possessed a merit which stood in no need 
of display. Such are the " epigrams " which my friend ban- 
tered in the London Journal with the following exquisite 
imitations. He has not even forgotten (as the Journal ob- 
served) the solemn turn of the heads of the epigrams, " Con- 
cerning Flavius " — " On the same " — a To Antonius concern- 
ing Lepidus," &c, "nor the ingenious art with which Martial 
contrives to have a reason asked him, for what he is bent on 
explaining." The banters, it is true, "have this drawback; 
that being good jokes upon bad ones, they cannot possibly 
convey the same impression;" but the reader is willing to 
guess it through the wit. 

" Concerning Jones. 
Jones eats his lettuces undress'd; 
D' you ask the reason? 'Tis confess'd, — 
That is the way Jones likes them best." 

"To Smith, concerning Thomson. 
Smith, Thomson puts no claret on his board; 
D' you ask the reason? — Thomson can't afford." 

" To GlBBS, CONCERNING HIS POEMS. 

You ask me if I think your poems good; 

If I could praise your poems, Gibbs, — I would." 

" Concerning the Same. 
Gibbs says, his poems a sensation make ; — 
But Gibbs, perhaps, is under a mistake." 

"To Thomson, concerning Dixon and Jackson. 
How Dixon can with Jackson bear, 
You ask me, Thomson, to declare; — 
Thomson, Dixon's Jackson's heir." 

"Were ever three patronymics jumbled so together! or with 
such a delightful importance ? It is like the jingling of the 
money in Jackson's pocket. 

How strange to sit laughing at my fireside over these 
epigrams, while he that wrote them, instead of coming to 
drink tea with me, is . . . 



884 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

But we are all bound somewhere together, as the sun and 
the planets are bound in one direction towards another part 
of the heavens ; and the intervals between the departures of 
the dead and the living are very small. 

The London Journal was followed by the production of 
Captain Sword and Captain Pen; — a poem which, poem 
though it was, and one which gave me a sense of my advance 
in imaginative culture, and consequent power of expression, 
nothing but a sense of duty could have enabled me to persist 
in writing. I have implied this before ; but I will now state, 
for reasons which may be of service, that I was several times 
forced to quit my task by accesses of wonder and horror so 
overwhelming, as to make me burst out in perspirations (a 
thing very difficult in me to produce), and that nothing but 
the physical relief thus afforded me, the early mother-taught 
lesson of subjecting the one to the many, and perhaps the I 
habit of thinking the best in worst, and believing that every- 
thing would, somehow or other, come right at last, could have 
given me courage enough to face the subject again. 

I remember three passages in particular, which tried me to 
a degree almost unbearable. One was that in which the 
shriek of the horse is noticed ; another, the description of 
the bridegroom lying by the -ditch, sabred, and calling for 
water ; and the third, the close of the fourth canto, where 
the horriblest thing occurs, that maddens a taken city. Men 
of action are too apt to think that an author, and especially a 
poet, dares and undergoes nothing as he peacefully sits by his 
fireside " indulging his muse." But the muse is sometimes an 
awful divinity. With truest devotion, and with dreadful neces- 
sity for patience, followed by what it prayed for, were the last 
three lines of that canto written.* Not that the trusting 
belief, for which I owe an unceasing debt of gratitude to my 
parents, failed me then or ever; but all the horror of won- 
der (and in such visitations wonder is a very horrible thing) 
passed over me with its black burthen ; and I looked back on 
it, as one might look upon the passage of some tremendous 
spirit, whose beneficence, though you still believed in it, had 
taken that astounding shape. Firmly do I believe, that all 
such sufferings, — and far worse, those under the very imagi- 
nation of which they suffer, — are for the very best and hap- 

* " O God! let me breathe, and look up at thy sky. 
Good is as hundreds, evil as one : 
Bound about goeth the golden sun." 



LITERARY PROJECTS. 385 

piest ends, whatever may be the darkness which they cast on 
one as they go. 

It was in that persuasion, as well as from need of relief, 
and for the due variation of my theme, that I intermingled 
these frightful scenes with passages of military gaiety, of 
festive enjoyment, and even of pleasantry ; such as the de- 
scription of the soldier's march, of the entertainments given to 
Captain Sword, and of the various dances in the ball-room : — 

" The country-dance, small of taste; 
And the waltz, that loveth the lady's waist; 
And the gallopade, strange agreeable tramp, 
Made of a scrape, a hobble, and stamp," &c. 

Gibbon said, that his having been a captain of militia was 
of use to him in writing his great work. With due feelings 
of subordination to the captain, I can say, that my having 
been a private in a regiment of volunteers was of use to me 
in performing this painful duty. 

u Stead}' steady! — the masses of men 
Wheel, and fall in, and wheel again, 
Softly as circles drawn with pen." 

I had been a part of the movement, and felt how soft and 
orderly it was. 

" Now for the flint, and the cartridge bite; 
Darkly gathers the breath of the fight, 
Salt to the palate, and stinging to sight." 

Many a cartridge had I bitten, and thus learned the salt to 
that dreadful dinner. 

It was about this time that I projected a poem of a very 
different sort, which was to be called A Day with the Reader. 

I proposed to invite the reader to breakfast, dine, and sup 
with me, partly at home, and partly at a country inn, in order 
to vary the circumstances. It was to be written both gravely 
and gaily, in an exalted or in a lowly strain, according to the 
topics of which it treated. The fragment on Paganini was a 
part of the exordium: 

" So play'd of late to every passing thought 
With finest change (might I but half as well 
So write !) the pale magician of the bow," &c. 

I wished to write in the same manner, because Paganini, 
with his violin, could move both the tears and the laughter of 
his audience, and (as I have described him dcing in the verses) 
would now give }^ou the notes of birds in trees, and even hens 
feeding in a farm-yard (which was a corner into which I meant 

25 



386 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

to take iny companion), and now melt you into grief and pity 
or mystify you with witchcraft, or put you into a state o 
lofty triumph like a conqueror. That phrase of " smiting 
the chords, — 

" He smote; — and clinging to the serious chords 
With godlike ravishment," &c. — 

was no classical commonplace; nor, in respect to impression 
on the mind, was it exaggeration to say, that from a sin^L 
chord he would fetch out 

" The voice of quires, and weight 
Of the built organ." 

Paganini, the first time I saw and heard him, and the first 
moment he struck a note, seemed literally to strike it; to givr 
it a blow. The house was so crammed, that, being amoi . 
the squeezers in " standing room" at the side of the pit, 
happened to catch the first sight of his face through the ar:. 
akimbo of a man who was perched up before me, whic 
made a kind of frame for it ; and there, on the stage, in that 
frame, as through a perspective glass, were the face, bust, ard 
raised hand, of the wonderful musician, with his instrument 
at his chin, just going to commence, and looking exact! v as I 
have described him. 

"His hand, 

Loading the air with dumb expectancy, 

Suspended, ere it fell, a nation's breath. 

" He smote; — and clinging to the serious chord> 
With godlike ravishment, drew forth a breath, — 
So deep, so strong, so fervid thick with love, — 
Blissful, yet laden as with twenty prayers, 
That Juno yearn'd with no diviner soul 
To the first burthen of the lips of Jove. 

" The exceeding mystery of the loveliness 
Sadden'd delight; and with his mournful look, 
Dreary and gaunt, hanging his pallid face 
'Twixt his dark flowing locks, he almost seem'd, 
■ To feeble or to melancholy eyes, 
One that had parted with his soul for pride, 
And in the sable secret liv'd forlorn." 

To show the depth and identicalness of the impression 
which he made on everybody, foreign or native, an Italian who 
stood near me, said to himself, after a sigh, "O Dio!" and 
this had not been said long, when another person in the same 
manner uttered the words, "O Christ!" Musicians pressed 
forward from behind the scenes, to get as close to him as pos- 
sible ; and they could not sleep at night for tb inking of him. 



LITERARY PROJECTS. 387 

I have mentioned the Monthly Repository. It was originally 
a magazine in the Unitarian interest, aud contained admirable 
papers by Mr. William Johnson Fox, the present member 
for Oldham, Mr. John Mill, and others; but it appeared, so to 
speak, in one of the least though most respectable corners of 
influence, and never obtained the repute it deserved. Nor, 
if such writers as these failed to counteract the drawback, 
could it be expected that others would help it better. The 
author of Orion made the attempt in vain; and so did the 
last of its editors, the present writer, though Landor assisted 
him. [The transfer of editorship took place in 1837.] In 
this publication, like better things before it, was sunk Blue- 
Stocking Bevels, or the Feast of the Violets — a kind of female 
,.. Feast of the Poets, which nobody took any notice of; though 
I had the pleasure of hearing that Mr. Kogers said it would 
. have been sufficient " to set up half a dozen young men about 
town in a reputation for wit and fancy." 

As Apollo in the Feast of the Poets gave a dinner to those 
gentlemen, in Blue-Stocking Bevels he gives a ball and supper 
to literary ladies. The guests were so numerous as to call 
forth a pleasant remark from Lord Holland, who, in a letter 
in which he acknowledged the receipt of the poem, said, that 
"the inspector of blue ankles under Phoebus" had, he per- 
ceived, " no sinecure." I believe the fair guests were not 
dissatisfied with their entertainment. It was thought by 
somebody, that objection was intended to Mrs. Somerville, 
because it was said of her, that 

• Instead of the little Loves, laughing at colleges, 
Round her, in doctors' caps, flew little Knowledges." 

But I did not mean to imply, either that the lady's knowledge 
was little, or that she was not a very amiable person. It was 
only a commonplace jest in a new shape. Perhaps it ought 
to have been followed by a recommendation to look into the 
faces of the " little Knowledges;" who are apt to have more 
love in them, than people suspect. 

A bookseller objected to publishing this poem on a very 
different account. He thought that Lady Biessington would 
take offence at the mention of her " shoulders," and at being 
' called a " Venus grown fat." 

" ' Lady Biessington!' cried the glad usher aloud, 
As she swam through the doorway, like moon from a cloud. 
I know not which most her face beam'd with, — fine creature ! 
Enjoyment, or judgment, or wit, or good-nature. 

25—2 



388 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

Perhaps yon have known what it is to feel longings 
To pat buxom shoulders at routs and such throngings; — 
Well, — think what it was, at a vision like that ! 
A Grace after dinner ! — a Venus grown fat ! " 

It would be strange if any lady, grown stout, would object to 
being thought a Venus notwithstanding: and it would be still 
stranger, if, after having her face lauded for so many fine 
qualities, she should object to having her shoulders admired 
Lady Blessington, at all events, had too much understanding to 
make such a mistake ; and, though I had not the pleasure of 
her acquaintance, I had good reason to know that she took the 
passage in anything but an offensive light. Let me take this 
opportunity of saying that her ladyship's account of Lord 
Byron is by far the best and most sensible I am acquainted 
with. Her writings, indeed, throughout, though not of a 
nature qualified to endure, were remarkable for a judgment 
as well as benevolence for which many would not give credit 
to an envied beauty. 



CHAPTEE XXV. 

PLAY-WRITING. — CONCLUSION. 

Poems of the kind just mentioned were great solaces to care; 
but the care was great notwithstanding. I felt age coming 
on me, and difficulties not lessened by failing projects : nor 
was I able, had I been never so inclined, to render my facul- 
ties profitable " in the market." It is easy to say to a man 
— Write such and such a thing, and it is sure to sell. Watch 
the public taste, and act accordingly. Care not for original 
composition ; for inventions or theories of your own ; for I 
aesthetics, which the many will be slow to apprehend. Stick 
to the works of others. Write only in magazines and reviews. 
Or if you must write things of your own, compile. Tell 
anecdotes. Reproduce memoirs and topographies. Repeat, 
in as many words of your own as you can, other men's criti- 
cisms. Do anything but write to the few, and you may get 
rich. 

There is a great deal of truth in all this. But a man can 
only do what he can, or as others will let him. Suppose he I 
has a conscience that will not suffer him to reproduce the 
works of other people, or even to speak what he thinks com- 
monplace enough to have become, common property. Suppose 



PLAY- WRITING. — CONCLUSION. 380 

this conscience will not allow him to accommodate himself to 
the opinion of editors and reviewers. Suppose the editors 
and reviewers themselves will not encourage him to write on 
the subjects he understands best, perhaps do not understand 
the subjects themselves; or suppose, at best, that they play 
with him, postpone him, and keep him only as a resource 
when their ordinary circle fails them. Suppose he has had 
to work his way up through animosities, political and reli- 
gious, and through such clouds of adversity as, even when 
they have passed away, leave a chill of misfortune round his 
repute, and make " prosperity " slow to encourage him. 
Suppose, in addition to all this, he is in bad health, and of 
fluctuating, as well as peculiar powers; of a temperament 
easily solaced in mind, and as easily drowsed in body ; quick 
to enjoy every object in creation, everything in nature and in 
art, every sight, every sound, every book, picture, and flower, 
and at the same time really qualified to do nothing, but either 
to preach the enjoyment of those objects in modes derived 
from his own particular nature and breeding, or to suffer with 
mingled cheerfulness and poverty the consequences of advo- 
cating some theory on the side of human progress. Great 
may sometimes be the misery of that man under the necessity 
of requesting forbearance or undergoing obligation ; and terri- 
ble will be his doubts, whether some of his friends may not 
think he had better have had a conscience less nice, or an 
activity less at the mercy of his physique. He will probably 
find himself carelessly, over-familiarly, or even superciliously 
treated, pitied, or patronized, by his inferiors; possibly will 
be counted inferior, even in moral worth, to the grossest and 
most mercenary men of the world ; and he will be forced to 
seek his consolation in what can be the only final consolation 
of any one who needs a charitable construction; namely, that 
he has given, hundreds of times, the construction which he 
would receive once for all. 

I did not understand markets; I could not command 
editors and reviewers ; I therefore obeyed an inclination 
which had never forsaken me, and wrote a play. The pro- 
pensity to dramatic writing had been strong in me from boy- 
hood. I began to indulge in it long before my youthful 
criticisms on the theatre. The pieces which I then wrote 
have been mentioned in the earlier part of this volume. 
They were, all failures, even in my own opinion; so that 
there can be little doubt of their having been actually such : 



390 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH IIUXT. 

but the propensity remained, and the present consequence was 
the Legend of Florence, 

I wrote this play in six weeks, in a state of delightful 
absorption, notwithstanding the nature of the story and of the 
cares which beset me ; and now, for the first time, I thought 
I had done something dramatic, which might be put forth to 
the world without misgiving. It was declined by the prin- 
cipal manager then reigning. I wrote another blank-verse 
play in five acts, thinking to please better by adapting it to 
his taste, but I succeeded as little by this innocent artifice; 
and thus seemed closed upon me the prospect of any better- 
ing of my fortunes, the most needed. 

I have reasons of a very special and justifiable kind for 
saying thus much, and showing how my labours were lost; 
and I subsequently lost more ; but not without an interval of 
refreshment and hope. How pleasant it was, long afterwards, 
to find my rejected Legend welcomed and successful at an- 
other theatre [Covent Garden, in February, 1840]. Here I 
became acquainted, for the first time, with a green-room, and 
surrounded with a congratulating and cordial press of actors 
and actresses. But every step which I took into Covent 
Garden Theatre was pleasant from the first. One of the com- 
pany, as excellent a woman as she was an actress, the late 
Mrs. Orger, whom I had the pleasure of knowing, brought 
me acquainted with the management; an old and esteemed 
friend was there to second her, in the person of the late Mr. 
Henry Eobertson, the treasurer, brother too of our quondam 
young society of " Elders," and every way harmonious asso- 
ciate of many a musical party afterwards at the NovelW, and 
at Hampstead. Mr. Charles Mathews welcomed me with a 
cordiality like his own : Mr. Planche, the wit and fairy poet 
of the house, whom envy accused of being jealous of the 
approach of new dramatists, not only contributed everything 
in his power to assist in making me feel at home in it, but 
added the applause of his tears on my first reading of the 
play. To conclude my triumph in the green-room, when I 
read the play afterwards to its heroine, Miss Tree (now Mrs. 
Charles Kean), I had the pleasure of seeing the tears pour 
down her glowing cheeks, and of being told by her afterwards, 
that she considered her representation of the character her 
best performance. And finally, to crown all, in every sense 
of the word, loyal as well as metaphorical, the Queen did the 
play the honour of coming to see it twice (to my knowledge) 



PLAY-WIUTIXG. — CONCLUSION. 391 

— four times, according to tliat of Madame Vestris, who 
ought to have known. Furthermore, when her Majesty saw 
it first, she was gracious and good-natured enough to express 
her approbation of it to the manager in words which she gave 
him permission to repeat to me ; and furthermost of all, some 
years afterwards she ordered it to be repeated before her at 
Windsor Castle, thus giving me a local memory in the place, 
which Surrey himself might have envied, and which Warton 
would certainly have hung, as a piece of its tapestry, with a 
sonnet. 

The four other blank-verse plays of which I have spoken, 
and one or two of which would have also come out at Covent 
Garden, had the management prospered, were called The Secret 
Marriage, since called The Prince's Marriage, which is the 
play I have mentioned as having endeavoured to propitiate my 
first manager's good- will. Lovers' Amazements, in three acts; 
The Double, the piece of mixed prose and verse in two ; and 
Look to your Morals, the prose afterpiece, or petty comedy. 
Lovers'' Amazements has since made its appearance, as late 
as the year 1858, with a success equal to that of the 
Legend. I shall have occasion to speak of it once again, be- 
fore I conclude. 

The Secret Marriage is the story of a prince of Navarre, 
whose marriage with a lady not of blood royal is resented by 
an envious nobility. It is founded on the celebrated history 
of Ines de Castro, of which, indeed, I first intended it to con- 
sist ; but in these effeminate daj^s of the drama, I found that 
its tragical termination would not be endured. At least the 
actors told me so. I said, that I had not intended to crown 
her dead body (which was what her husband actually did, 
forcing the nobles who assassinated her to attend the cere- 
mony) ; my design was to crown her coffin ; which is done in 
the Secret Marriage ; though matters in that play, in deference 
to modern requirement, are still brought happily about. 1 
confess that, both as a critic and an Englishman, I am ashamed 
of this alleged weakness on the part of the British public; this 
charge of not being able to endure a strong sensation, how- 
ever salutary. Nor do I believe it. The strong Saxon people, 
who have carried the world before them, are not the audiences 
to quail before a tragedy. The only point is how to set it truly 
and nobly before them ; and not in that gratuitous and vulgar 
style of horror, which it becomes manhood to repudiate. How 
is it that they endure Othello and Lear? " Oh ! " but say the 



o92 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

actors, u that is Shakspeare's writing." Yes ; and thus, like 
the cunning priests of a faith which they dishonour, they make 
a bugbear as well as a business of their idol ; as if all worship 
of the true and beautiful were to fail in its effects w r ith others, 
because they are without it themselves. I have heard actors 
themselves say, notwithstanding this esoterical religion of 
theirs, that Shakspeare himself would be damned to-morrow 
if he were to write now. The Secret Marriage was rejected 
by the same manager that rejected the Legend of Florence ; 
which is perhaps a good omen, if I could get it performed. 
But then it " costs money," pathetically say these caterers for 
the public amusement. 

Lovers' Amazements is an imbroglio of two ladies and two 
gentlemen, who are constantly undergoing surprises, which 
make them doubt the fidelity or the regard of one another. 
But then, in this beautiful modern state of the British theatres, 
I was asked, with the like pathos, w r here were two gentleman 
actors and two lady actresses to be found, who could, or, if 
they could, would perform a play in which they are all four 
put on a level perhaps in point of intellectual pretension. 
Nevertheless, after a lapse of many years, the piece, as I have 
just stated, has been brought out with success. Some other 
particulars respecting it will be given in order of time. In 
vain I answered that one charming actress took singular pains 
to get it performed, and that another would have had it per- 
formed, but for the closing of her theatre. I was defied to 
get four gentlefolks of the stage together, or any four together, 
competent to perform the parts. How different from what I 
had seen in former days ! 

The Double is founded on a story, from the Italian novelists, 
of a clever fisherman, who bears so strong a resemblance to a 
gentleman who is drowned, while bathing in his company, 
that he is tempted to personate the deceased, and tc take 
possession of his house. To render the personation more pro- 
bable, I turned the fisherman into an actor. But this piece 
also was objected to on the score of its not being thoroughly 
" pleasant." That, according to the actors, is the great requisite 
now with the robust British public. You must make every- 
thing " pleasant" to them ; — give them nothing but sops and 
honey. At least, in polite theatres. You may frighten the 
people in the Borough ; but you must not think of startling 
the nerves at the West End. 

The two principal characters in Look to your Morals, are 



PLAY- WBITIXG.— CONCLUSION. 393 

an English valet, and a French damsel whom he has married. 
He is very jealous; and in order to keep down the attractive- 
ness of her animal spirits, he has told her that there is nothing 
but the most rigid propriety in England, both in morals and 
demeanour, and that she is to regulate her behaviour accord- 
ingly. The girl, who is a very innocent girl, believes him ; 
and the' consequence is, that she has to undergo a series of 
attentions, which very much open her French eyes. I know 
not how far the impression of this is to rank with the "un- 
pleasant" things that are not to be risked with the British 
public. The stage, to be sure, is so much in the habit of 
pampering the national self-love, especially on the side of its 
virtues and respectability, and this, too, at the expense of our 
lively neighbours, that I can suppose it possible for a theatre 
to see some danger in it. At all events, the manager in whose 
hands it has been put, kept it by him as safe as gunpowder : 
— so safe indeed, Hibernically speaking, that on a late inquiry 
for it, it appeared to be lost ; and I have no complete copy. 
He is old and ailing, however; and I shall not turn gun- 
powder myself, and blow him up. [It was found after the 
author's death, and returned to the family.] 

About a dozen years ago, in consequence of disappointments 
of this kind, and of those before mentioned, some friends re- 
newed an application to Lord Melbourne, which they had made 
in the reign previous. It was thought that my sufferings in 
the cause of reform, and my career as a man of letters, rendered 
me not undeserving a pension. His lordship received both the 
applications with courtesy ; which he does not appear to have 
shown in quarters where the interest might have been thought 
greater; but the pension was not granted. Perhaps the cour- 
tesy was on that account. Perhaps he gave my friends these 
and other evidences of his good-will towards me, knowing that 
he should advise nothing further; for I had twice during his 
administration received grants from the Eoyal Bounty Fund, 
of two hundred pounds each ; once during the reign of King 
William, and the second after the accession of her Majesty. 
It subsequently turned out, that Lord Melbourne considered 
it proper for no man to have a pension given him by one 
sovereign, who had been condemned in a court of law for 
opposing another. 

Simultaneous with the latest movement about the pension, 
was one on the part of my admirable friend Dickens and other 
distinguished men, — Forsters and Jerrolds, — who, combining 



394 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

kindly purpose with an amateur inclination for the stage, had 
condescended to show to the public what excellent actors they 
could have been, had they so pleased, — what excellent actors, 
indeed, some of them were. They were of opinion that a 
benefit for myself at one of the metropolitan theatres would 
be a dishonour on neither side. A testimonial of a different 
sort, which had been proposed by some other friends, was 
superseded by this form of one ; and preparations were being 
accordingly made, when the grant of the pension seemed to 
render it advisable that the locality of the benefit should be 
transferred from London to a provincial stage, in acknow- 
ledgment to the superior boon, and for the avoidance of all 
appearance of competing with it. The result was still of great 
use to me, and my name was honoured in a manner I shall 
never forget by an address from the pens of Mr. Serjeant (late 
Justice) Talfourd and Sir Edward Bulwer, and the plaudits of 
Birmingham and Liverpool. Talfourd had always been one of 
my best and dearest friends; and Sir Edward, with whom I 
became acquainted much later, had, before I knew him, and 
when it was a bold thing to praise me in the circles, done me, 
nevertheless, that handsome and valuable service. The pieces 
performed on this occasion were Ben Jonson's Every Man in 
his Humour, and the farce of — I forget what, in the country, 
for I was not there ; but the play had been repeated before in 
town, as it was afterwards, and several farces came after it. 

If anything had been needed to show how men of letters 
include actors, on the common principle of the greater 
including the less, these gentlemen would have furnished it. 
Mr. Dickens's "Bcbadil" had a spirit in it of intellectual appre- 
hension beyond anything the existing stage has shown : his 
farce throughout was always admirable, — quite rich and filled 
up ; so were the tragical parts in which he subsequently 
appeared ; and Mr. Forster delivered the verses of Ben Jonson 
and Fletcher with a musical flow and a sense of their grace 
and beauty unknown, I believe, to the recitation of actors at 
present. At least I have never heard anything like it since 
Edmund Kean's. The lines came out of his lips as if he loved 
them. I allude particularly, in this instance, to his perform- 
ance of the " Younger Brother." But he did it always, when 
sweet verse required it. 

Meantime, I had removed with my family from Chelsea to 
Kensington ; and although my health was not bettered, as I 
hoped it would have been by the change, but, on the contrary, 



PLAY-WiUTIXG. — CONCLUSION. 305 

was made worse in respect to body than I ever experienced, 
and showed me the formidable line that is drawn between being 
elderly and being old (for we unfortunately got into a part 
which had been denounced in the books of the Sanitary Com- 
missioners), yet I loved Kensington for many reasons, and do 
still, even for one more of a melancholy description, hereafter 
to be noticed, nay, love it the more on that account, though I 
can never pass the spot without a pang. 

Here, sometimes in the Gardens, sometimes in the quondam 
Nightingale-lane of Holland House (now partially diverted), 
I had the pleasure of composing the Palfrey, the scenes of 
which are partly laid in the place. Here (with the exception 
of a short interval at Wimbledon) I wrote, besides reviews and 
shorter articles, one of the dramatic pieces above mentioned, the 
criticism in Imagination and Fancy, and Wit and Humour ; the 
Stories from the Italian Poets ; the Jar of Honey ; the criticism 
in the Book for a Corner ; a portion of the Town (most of 
which had been produced long before) ; and lastly, the 
greater part of the work which the reader is now perusing. At 
the close of the second volume of the Italian Stories I had a 
severe illness. I had opposed a lethargic tendency to which 
I am subject, the consequence of hepatitis, with too free a use 
of coffee, which ended in a dangerous attack of the loins, the 
effects of which appeared for a good while to be irrecoverable ; 
but they were not. A friend, the late estimable Mr. Stritch, 
who had often looked in upon me and found me sitting with 
cold feet, and with a bust, as it were, on fire, repeatedly 
warned me of what would happen ; but I was sanguine, was 
foolish, and down I went. I used to envy my friend for his 
being able to walk leisurely in and out, and thought how sure 
he was of living beyond me. And now he is gone. Too 
many of such surprises have I had ; but there is always good 
of some kind in evil. My friend's last moments were as brief 
as they were unlooked for. I had also another consolation 
during my illness. It has so happened that several of my 
illnesses have taken place after I had been writing on matters 
connected with religion, and in those cases I have always 
had the comfort of knowing that I had been doing my best 
to diminish superstition. In the present instance, I had been 
attacking the infernal opinions of Dante — a task which no 
respect for his genius, or false considerations for the times in 
which he lived (lor others who lived in them were above 
them), can ever make me regard but as a duty and a glory ; 



396 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HOTT. 

for though I acknowledge the true part of might to be right, 
yet might of any sort never so much astonished me as that I 
could not discern in it what was not might ; and Dante's 
venturing on his ghastly visions did not blind me to that false 
support and intoxicating spirit of vindictiveness, which enabled 
him to do it. Dante (alas ! that such a conjunction should be 
possible) was one of the greatest poets and most childishly 
mistaken men that ever existed ; and if it requires an audacity 
like his own to say it — here it is. 

One more book I wrote partly at Kensington, which I can 
take no pride in, — which I desire to take no pride in, — and 
yet which I hold dearer than all the rest. I have mentioned 
a book called Christianism, or Belief and Unbelief Reconciled y 
which I wrote in Italy. The contents of that book, modified, 
were added to the one I speak of ; and the latter (of which 
more, when I speak of its completion) had the same object as 
the former, with better provision for practical result ; that is to 
say, it proposed to supply, not thoughts and aspirations only, 
but a definite faith, and a daily set of duties, to such humble, 
yet un-abject, and truly religious souls, as cannot accept 
unintelligible and unworthy ties of conscience, and yet feel 
both their weakness and their earnestness with sufficient self- 
knowledge to desire ties of conscience, both as bonds and 
encouragements. My family, some other friends, and myself, 
were in accord upon the principles of the book ; it did us 
good for a sufficient length of time to make us think it would 
do good to others ; and its publication, which has since taken 
place, was contemplated accordingly. 

With the occasional growth of this book, with the produc- 
tion of others from necessity, with the solace of verse, and 
with my usual experience of sorrows and enjoyments, of 
sanguine hopes and bitter disappointments, of bad health and 
almost unconquerable spirits (for though my old hypochondria 
never returned, I sometimes underwent pangs of unspeakable 
will and longing, on matters which eluded my grasp), I passed 
in this and another spot of the same suburb by no means the 
worst part of these my latter days, till one terrible loss befell 
me. The same unvaried day saw me reading or writing, 
ailing, jesting, reflecting, rarely stirring from home but to 
walk, interested in public events, in the progress of society, in 
the " New Keformation" (most deeply), in things great and 
small, in a print, in a plaster-cast, in a hand-organ, in the 
stars, in the sun to which the sun was hastening, in the flower 



PLAY-WRITIXG. — CONCLUSION. 007 

on my table, in the % on my paper while I wrote. (He 
crossed words, of which he knew nothing ; and perhaps we 
all do as much every moment, over things of divines t mean- 
ing.) I read everything that was readable, old and new, par- 
ticularly fiction, and philosophy, and natural history ; was 
always returning to something Italian, or in Spenser, or in the 
themes of the East; lost no particle of Dickens, of Thackeray, 
of Mrs. Gaskell (whose Mary Barton gave me emotions that 
required, more and more, the consideration of the good which 
it must do) ; called out every week for my Family Herald, a 
little penny publication, at that time qualified to inform the 
best of its contemporaries ; rejoiced in republications of wise 
and witty Mrs. Gore, especially seeing she only made us wait 
for something newer ; delighted in the inexhaustible wit of 
Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, and his coadjutors, Tom Taylor, 
Percival Leigh, and others, in Punch, the best-humoured and 
best-hearted satirical publication that ever existed; wondered 
when Bulwer Lytton would give us more of his potent romances 
and prospective philosophies ; and hailed every fresh publication 
of James, though I knew half what he was going to do with his 
lady, and his gentleman, and his landscape, and his mystery, 
and his orthodoxy, and his criminal trial. But I was charmed 
with the new amusement which he brought out of old materials. 
I looked on him as I should look upon a musician, famous for 
" variations." I was grateful for his vein of cheerfulness, for 
his singularly varied and vivid landscapes, for his power of 
painting women at once lady-like and loving (a rare talent), 
for his making lovers to match, at once beautiful and well- 
bred, and for the solace which all this has afforded me, some- 
times over and over again, in illness and in convalescence, 
when I required interest without violence, and entertainment 
at once animated and mild. 

Yet I could at any time quit these writers, or any other, 
for men, who, in their own persons, and in a spirit at once the 
boldest and most loving, dared to face the most trying and 
awful questions of the time, — the Lamennais and Eobert 
Owens, the Parkers, the Foxtons, and the Newmans, — noble 
souls, who, in these times, when Christianity is coming into 
flower, are what the first Christians were when it was only in 
the root, — brave and good hearts, and self-sacrificing con- 
sciences, prepared to carry it as high as it can go, and thinking 
no earthly consideration j>aramount to the attainment of its 
heavenly ends. I may differ with one of them in this 



398 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

or that respect ; I may differ with a second in another ; but 
difference with such men, provided we differ in their own 
spirit, is more harmonious than accord with others ; nay, 
would form a part of the highest music of our sphere, being 
founded on the very principle of the beautiful, which combines 
diversity with sameness, and whose " service is perfect free- 
dom." Nobody desires an insipid, languid, and monotonous 
world, but a world of animated moral beauty equal to its phy- 
sical beauty, and a universal church, embracing many folds. 

I admire and love all hearty, and earnest, and sympathizing 
men, whatever may be their creed — the admirable Berkeleys 
and Whichcotes, the Father Matthews and Geddeses, the 
Mendelssohns, the Lavaters, the Herders, the Williamses and 
the Priestleys, the Channings, Adam Clarkes, Halls, Carlyles 
and Emersons, the Hares, Maurices, Kingsleys, Whatelys, 
Foxes, and Vaughans; but, of course, I must admire most 
those who have given the greatest proofs of self-sacrifice, equal 
to them as the others may be, and prepared to do the like if 
their conclusions demand it. 

Alas ! how poor it seems, and how painfully against the 
grain it is, to resume talk about oneself after adverting to 
people like these. But my book must be finished; and of 
such talk must autobiographies be made. I assure the reader, 
that, apart from emotions forced upon me, and unless I am 
self- deluded indeed, I take no more interest in the subject of 
my own history, no, nor a twentieth part so much as I do in 
that of any other autobiography that comes before me. The 
present work originated in necessity, was commenced with 
unwillingness, has taken several years of illness and interrup- 
tion to write, repeatedly moved me to ask the publisher to let 
me change it for another (which, out of what he was pleased 
to consider good for everybody, he would not allow), and 
I now send it a second time, and with additional matter, into 
the world, under the sure and certain conviction, that every 
autobiographer must of necessity be better known to his 
readers than to himself, let him have written as he may, and 
that that better knowledge is not likely to lead to his advan- 
tage. So be it. The best will judge me kindliest; and I 
shall be more than content with their conclusions. 

Among the verses with which I solaced myself in the 
course of these prose writings, were those which from time to 
time appeared in the Morning Chronicle, on occasions con- 
nected with the happiness of the Queen, such as the celebra- 



FLAY-YTIIITIXG.— CONCLUSIOX. 399 

tion of her Majesty's birthday, the births of the royal children, 
&c. I have mentioned the train of ideas which circumstances 
had led me to associate with my thoughts of the Queen. 

I consider myself always a royalist of the only right English 
sort; that is to say, as a republican, with royalty for his safe- 
guard and ornament. I can conceive no condition of society 
in which some form of that tranquil, ornamental, and most 
useful thing called monarchy, will not be the final refuge of 
political dispute and vicissitude ; and this being my opinion, 
and loving the Queen as I do, I wish with all my heart that 
her family may govern us in peace and security to the end of 
time. But though I reverence the past, and can imagine that 
aristocracies, like all other great facts, may have rendered 
great and necessary service in its time, and though I would 
have no change from past to future take place by any but the 
softest and most respectful degrees, yet, inasmuch as I am for 
seeing no paupers in the land, I am for seeing no ultra rich. 
I love individuals among the aristocracy, and bless and reve- 
rence the good they do with their riches ; but for their own 
sakes, as well as for that of the poor, I wish the poor did not 
give so much trouble to their riches, nor the riches of their 
less worthy brethren so many miserable thoughts to the poor. 
I feel just the same with respect to great cotton-spinners, or 
to any other amassers of treasure, by the side, and by the 
means, of the half-starved. And I do not hold myself at all 
answered by any reference to the ordinations of Providence ; 
for Providence, by the like reasoning, ordinates dreadful 
revenges and retributions ; and I think that in the instinctive 
efforts of humanity to advance, and to advance quietly, Pro- 
vidence clearly ordinates that we are to dispense with any 
such references in either direction. 

These opinions of mine would have been seen fully ex- 
pressed in many a previous publication, nor had they been 
intimated even courtwards for the first time. They were 
implied in the following passage from the lines on the birth- 
day of the Princess Alice : 

" What a world, were human-kind 
All of one instructed mind ! 
What a world to rule, to please ; — 
To share 'twixt enterprise and ease! 
Graceful manners flowing round 
From the court's enchanted ground ; 
Comfort keeping all secure, — 
None too rich, and none too poor.'* 



400 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

I never addressed any congratulation to the Queen without 
implying something in this spirit ; something in behalf of 
progress and the poor: 

" May she every day 

See some new good winning its gentle way 

By means of mild and unforbidden men! 

And when the sword hath bow'd beneath the pen, 

May her own line a patriarch scene unfold, 

As far surpassing what these days behold, 

E'en in the thunderous gods, iron and steam, 

As they the sceptic's doubt, or wild man's dream ! " 

(The benediction here passes from the political to the religious 
future.) 

" And to this end, — oh ! to this Christian end, 
And the sure coming of its next great friend, 
May her own soul, this instant, while I sing, 
Be smiling, as beneath some angel's wing, 
O'er the dear life in life, — the small, sweet, new, 
Unselfish self, — the filial self of two; 
Bliss of her future eyes, her pillow'd gaze, 
On whom a mother's heart thinks close, and prays." 

Lines on Her Majesty's Birthday. 

In this passage I meant to express a hope that the next reign- 
ing sovereign would see a great advance in Christianity itself, 
and be its friend accordingly. But I did not state what I 
expected that advance to be. I now feel it my duty to be 
explicit on the subject; and the reader will see at once how 
" unorthodox " is my version of Christianity, when I declare 
that I do not believe one single dogma, which the reason that 
God has put in our heads, or the heart that he has put in our 
bosoms, revolts at. For though reason cannot settle many 
undeniable mysteries that perplex us, and though the heart 
must acknowledge the existence of others from which it can- 
not but receive pain, yet that is no reason why mysteries 
should be palmed upon reason of which it sees no evidences 
whatever, or why pain should be forced upon the heart, for 
which it sees grounds as little. On the contrary, the more 
mysteries there are with which I cannot help being perplexed, 
the less number of them will I gratuitously admit for the 
purpose of perplexing my brain further ; and the greater the 
number of the pains that are forced upon my heart, the fewer 
will I be absurd enough to invite out of the regions of the 
unproveable, to afflict me in addition. What evils there are, 
I find, for the most part, relieved with many consolations: 
some I find to be necessary to the requisite amount of good : 



PLAY-WRITING. — CONCLUSION. 401 

and every one of them I find to come to a termination; for 
the sufferers either are cured and live, or are killed and die ; 
and in the latter case I see no evidence to prove, that a 
little finger of them aches any more. This palpable revela- 
tion, then, of God, which is called the universe, contains no 
evidence whatsoever of the thing called eternal punishment ; 
and why should I admit any assertion of it that is not at all 
palpable? If an angel were to tell me to believe in eternal 
punishment, I would not do it, for it would better become me 
to believe the angel a delusion than God monstrous; and we 
make him monstrous when we make him the author of eternal 
punishment, though we have not the corn-age to think so. 
For God's sake, let us have piety enough to believe him 
better. I speak thus boldly, not in order to shock anybody, 
which it would distress me to think I did, but because opinions 
so shocking distress myself, and because they ought, I think, 
to distress everybody else, and so be put an end to. Of any 
readers whom I may shock, I beg forgiveness. Only I would 
entreat them to reflect how far that creed can be in the 
right which renders it shocking in God's children to think the 
best of their Father. 

I respect all churches which are practically good. I respect 
the Church of England in particular, for its moderate exercise 
of power, and because I think it has been a blessed medium 
of transition from superstition to a right faith. Yet, inasmuch 
as I am of opinion tr^at the " letter killeth and the spirit 
giveth life," I am looking to see the letter itself killed, and 
the spirit giving life, for the first time, to a religion which 
need revolt and shock nobody. 

But it becomes me, before I close my book, to make a 
greater avowal ; for I think it may assist, in however small a 
degree, towards smoothing the advent of a great and inevitable 
change. 

It seems clear to me, from all which is occurring in Europe 
at this moment, from the signs in the papal church, in our 
own church, in the universal talk and minds of men, whether 
lor it or against it, that the knell of the letter of Christianity 
itself has struck, and that it is time for us to inaugurate and 
enthrone the spirit. I was in hopes, when Pius the Ninth 
first made his appearance in Europe, that a great as well as 
good man had arisen, competent to so noble a task. Young 
Italy, let loose from prison, fell at his feet ; and I think, that 
had he persevered in what made it do so, all Europe would 

26 



402 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEICIH HU5TT. 

have fallen at his feet, and the papal power have thus profited 
by its greatest and only remaining chance of retaining the 
sceptre of the Christian world. But the new Pope was fright- 
ened at being thought one of the " New Christians " (as 
Lamartine called them) ; he hastened to issue a bull declaring 
the .unalterableness of every papal dogma; and the moment 
he did that, he signed the death-warrant of his church. 
Dogma, whatever may be the convulsive appearances to the 
contrary in certain feeble quarters, has ceased to be a vital 
European principle ; and nothing again will ever be uni- 
versally taken for Christianity, but the religion of Loving 
Duty to God and Man ; — to God, as the Divine Mind which 
brings good and beauty out of blind- working matter ; and to 
Man, as God's instrument for advancing the world we live in, 
and as partaker with his fellow-men of suffering, and endea- 
deavour, and enjoyment. "Beason," says Milton, "is choice;" 
and where is to be found a religion better to choose than this ? 
Immortality is a hope for all, which it is not just to make a 
blessing for any less number, or a misery for a single soul. 
Faith depends for its credibility on its worthiness; and with- 
out " works" is " dead." But charity, by which lovely Greek 
word is not to be understood any single form of moral grace 
and kindness, but every possible form of it conducive to love 
on earth, and its link with heaven, is the only sine qua non 
of all final opinions of God and man. 

" Behold I give unto you a new commandment, — Love one 
another." " In this ye fulfil the law and the prophets." " By 
their fruits ye shall know them." " God is Love." 

Such, and such only, are the texts upon which sermons will 
be preached, to the exclusion of whatsoever is infernal and 
unintelligible. No hell. No unfatherliness. No monstrous 
exactions of assent to the incredible. No impious Athanasian 
Creed. No creed of any kind but such as proves its divine- 
ness by the wish of all good hearts to believe it if they might, 
and by the encouragement that would be given them to believe 
it, in the acclamations of the earth. The world has outgrown 
the terrors of its childhood, and no spurious mistake of a 
saturnine spleen for a masculine necessity will induce a return 
to them. Mankind have become too intelligent ; too brave ; 
too impatient of being cheated, and threatened, and " put off;" 
too hungry and thirsty for a better state of things in the 
beautiful planet in which they live, and the beauty of which 
has been an unceasing exhortation and preface to the result, 



LIFE DRAWING TOWARDS ITS CLOSE. 403 

By that divine doctrine will all men gradually come to know 
in how many quarters the Divine Spirit has appeared among 
them, and what sufficing lessons for their guidance they have 
possessed in almost every creed, when the true portions of it 
shall hail one another from nation to nation, and the mixture 
of error through which it worked has become unnecessary. 
For God is not honoured by supposing him a niggard of his 
bounty. Jesus himself was not divine because he was Jesus, 
but because he had a divine and loving heart ; and wherever 
such greatness has appeared, there has divineness appeared 
also, as surely as the same sunshine of heaven is on the moun- 
tain tops of east and west. 

Such are the doctrines, and such only, accompanied by ex- 
positions of the beauties and wonders of God's great book of 
the universe, which will be preached, in the temples of the 
earth, including those of our beloved country, England, its 
beautiful old ivied turrets and their green neighbourhoods, 
then, for the first time, thoroughly uncontradicted and hea- 
venly; with not a sound in them more terrible than the 
stormy yet sweet organ, analogous to the beneficent winds and 
tempests ; and no thought of here or hereafter, that can dis- 
turb the quiet aspect of the graves, or the welcome of the 
new-born darling. 

And that such a consummation may come slowly but surely, 
without intermission in its advance, and with not an injury to 
a living soul, will be the last prayer, as it must needs be 
among the latest words, of the author of this book. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

LIFE DRAWING TOWARDS ITS CLOSE. 

When I closed the preceding chapter, which terminated the 
first edition of this biography, I did not think it would be 
followed by one like the present. I fancied I should go on, 
living as I did before, reading and writing as usual, working 
placidly rather than otherwise to the last, reckoning confi- 
dently on my being survived by every one of my family, old 
as well as young, and closing my days, if with no great 
applause from such of my fellow-creatures as had read me or 
heard of me, yet with no reproach from any of them, and 
something like regret from all. 



404 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF XEIGH HUNT. 

This latter portion of my life, trying soever as much of the 
rest of it had been, has turned out to be the most trying of 
the whole. It has had at the same time some sweets as well 
as bitters, and I have never been without the comforts of a 
hopeful and unembittered religion. 

Fortunately, the necessity of squaring the size of the new 
edition of this biography to that of the series of publications 
in which it is to appear, has required, that what I have to 
say, in continuation and completion of it up to the present 
moment, should be put into as brief a compass as possible; 
and with the comforts of this inexpressible relief (for I had 
been given to understand otherwise) I proceed. 

The first disquiet I experienced was owing to mistakes 
respecting the book itself; some of which greatly surprised 
me. One was, that I had mentioned a friend in a disparaging, 
nay, in an ironical manner, when I intended him a positive 
compliment, and one of no little amount. Another, I fear 
(for I could construe the intimation in no other manner), con- 
sisted in supposing that I had undervalued a friend for one 
of his very accomplishments, when I never dreamt of such a 
thing, nor in fact thought of the accomplishment at all, but 
as a matter in which it pleased his great genius to interest 
itself. A third mistake, still more extraordinary, gave out 
that I had not mentioned another friend at all, whom I ex- 
pressly and honourably recorded. And not to mention mis- 
takes of critics, equally proveable by the simple statement 
of facts (though most of those gentlemen were very kind to 
the book, and expressed so much personal good-will as to 
warrant me in thinking my thanks would please them), one of 
them, who had got into a position of authority which he was 
not equal to, and whom I had unfortunately met a little while 
before at a dinner-party, when I had occasion to differ with 
him in almost all he said, took me to task for having written 
books at all, and not stuck to a prudent clerkship in the War 
Office. I thought this at first a singular objection for a Jew 
(for such, I was told, he was), seeing that I had been a friend 
of the Jews all my life, and an advocate for their emanci- 
pation from all uncivic restrictions. But then, to say nothing 
of the dinner, I found that he was a converted Jew. 

These things disturbed me, and did me disservice ; but the 
mistakes respecting friends were all cleared up, and the most 
uncomfortable of my feelings had lain in those — so I had 
nothing remaining at heart to complain of. Among the many 



LIFE DRAWING HOWARDS ITS CLOSE. 405 

pleasant letters, too, which I received about the book from 
readers old and new, two in particular would have made me 
amends for much worse treatment than I received from my 
bilious quitter of the synagogue ; one from a man of lofty 
genius, whom I hesitate to name, because I have no right, 
perhaps, to boast of what may have been a mere impulse of 
his good-nature at the moment, congratulating me on having 
been victorious in my struggles with the perplexities of good 
and evil ; and another from my dear friend the late Duke of 
Devonshire, whom I do name because it gives me an oppor- 
tunity for saying how grateful I am to his memory for acts of 
kindness never to be forgotten. 

Towards the close of the year 1849, a proposition was made 
to me for the revival, in another form, of the London Journal , 
which had been published under my name. It was revived 
accordingly, and had to boast of contributions from distin- 
guished friends ; but it failed — partly, perhaps, for want of 
accordance with other pens concerned ; but chiefly from the 
smallness of the means which the proposers had thought suffi- 
cient for its establishment. 

I had scarcely become reconciled to this disappointment, 
when the impending danger was disclosed to me of a domestic 
calamity of which I had not had the least suspicion. It was 
the consumption of a beloved son, my youngest, the same who 
has been mentioned as having been born during my sojourn 
in Italy, and of whom it was added in the first edition, that 
from that hour to the one in which I was writing he had been 
a comfort to his parents. Let the reader judge with what 
feelings I write of him now. He was just reaching his thir- 
tieth year. He had not lived away from home during the 
whole time, with the exception of some nine or ten months. 
He was one of the most amiable, interesting, and sympathising 
of human beings, a musician by nature, modulating sweet 
voluntaries on the pianoforte — a born poet of the tender do- 
mestic sort, though in his modesty he had taken too late to 
the cultivation of the art, and left little that was finished to 
show for it ; and he was ever so ready to do good offices for 
others at his own expense, that I am not sure the first seeds of 
his distemper were not produced by an act almost identical 
with that which was the death of my mother, and aggravated 
by his first undergoing fatigue in assisting the wayfaring and 
the poor. For nearly two years I saw him fading before my 
eyes ; and a like time elapsed before he ceased to be the chief 



406 AtTTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

occupation of my thoughts. For nine months it was all but 
a monomania with me ; and I devoutly thanked Heaven for 
having twice in the course of my life undergone the like 
haunting of one idea, and so learnt to hope that it might ter- 
minate. I mention this to comfort such persons as have ex- 
perienced the like suffering. My son's Christian name was 
Vincent. This is only the second time I have dared to write 
it. He died at the close of October, in the year 1852, and was 
buried in beautiful Kensal Green, my own final bed-chamber, I 
trust, in this world, towards which I often look in my solitary 
walks, with eyes at once most melancholy, yet consoled. 

I add a sonnet of his writing, not because, though very 
good, it was the best thing he could do, as verses which he 
left unfinished bear witness ; but because it shows the sweet- 
ness of his nature. For his whole life was of a piece with it, 
though it was not called upon to act in that particular manner. 

THE DEFORMED CHILD. 

An angel, prison'd in an infant frame 
Of mortal sickness and deformity, 
Looks patiently from out that languid eye, 

Matured, and seeming large, with pain. The name 

Of " happy childhood w mocks his movements tame, 
So propp'd with piteous crutch ; or forced to lie 
Rather than sit, in its frail chair, and try 

To taste the pleasure of the unshared game. 

He does; and faintly claps his wither'd hands 
To see how brother Willie caught the ball; 
Kind brother Willie, strong, yet gentle all: 

? Twas he that placed him, where his chair now stands, 
In that warm corner 'gainst the sunny wall, — 

God, in that brother, gave him more than lands. 

It was a colder break of dawn than usual, but equally 
beautiful, as if, in both respects, it came to take him away, 
when my son died. His last words were poetry itself. A 
glass of water had been given him at his request ; and on 
feeling the refreshment of it, he said, " I drink the morning." 

And there are those who would persuade us, that this 
beautiful soul will never be seen by us more ! Could space 
then be filled? so that there should nowhere be any room 
for the soul? That is impossible. And must not beauty 
exist, as long as there are stars, and their orderly movements 
anywhere? That is certain. Why then should any such 
portions of beauty perish, when there is no need of their 
perishing ? And why should they not live on, and drink up 



life D&Awnra towards its close. 407 

those tears as they did the morning, since God has so made 
ns long for it, when he need not have done so? As the 
tendency to sleep is the augury and harbinger of sleep, so 
desire Like this — let ns be sure of it — is the augury and 
harbinger of what it has been made to desire. Do we suppose 
that God makes manifest halves of anything, without intend- 
ing the remainders ? 

I took what refuge I could from this and other afflictions 
in a task which I had long been anxious to execute, and 
which, as I was now verging on the time of life usually allotted 
to human existence, I thought I might not live to perform at 
all, if I did not hasten it. This was the completion of the 
work which I have alluded to before under its first title of 
Christianism, or Belief and Unbelief Reconciled, and which I 
now enlarged and finished, and entitled the Religion of the 
Heart. I knew it could produce me no money ; was ashamed 
indeed of being under the necessity of letting it pay such of 
its expenses as it could ; and to a sense of this waste of 
precious time (as my friend, the converted Jew, would have 
called it), I had to add the uneasiness arising from a fear, lest, 
in spite of all my endeavours to the contrary, and my wish to 
offend nobody more than it could help, I should displease some 
of the friends whose attachment and adherence to me under 
all other trials I most valued. I wish, for many reasons, 
that I could here say more of the book, than from the limits 
assigned me I find possible. I had hoped to say much, and to 
enlarge on that remarkable state of existing religious uneasi- 
ness, which I cannot but regard as one of the last phases of 
transition from inconsistent and embittered modes of faith to 
one more at peace with itself, ultimately destined to be wholly 
so with God, man, and futurity. In the first, faintest, and even 
turbid dawn of the advent of that time, I see the tops of our 
church steeples, old and new, touched by a light long looked 
for, long announced, long in spirit against letter prepared for 
and produced by the divinest hearts that have appeared on 
earth, very different from polemical prelates or the threaten- 
ing mistakes of many men ; and it was by the sincerity of my 
belief in the sufficiency of those hearts, and of what they have 
done for the coming ages (which it was only my humble 
business to collect and record, as a help towards better ser- 
vices), that I found myself happily relieved from the anxiety 
alluded to respecting the feelings of friends; not one of whom, 
from their highest to humblest quarters, gave me the least 



408 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUKT. 

reason to suppose that I had done anything but even increase 
their good-will. For which good issue God and their good 
hearts be thanked. Perhaps it is better, upon the whole, that 
the book in question, the Religion of the Heart, should be left 
to stand apart for consideration from the present book, and so 
speak for itself to those who choose to consult it ; for my creed, 
however as serious upon serious points as eternity itself, being, 
nevertheless, as cheerful as its freedom from cruel terrors gives 
it a right to be, I have never yet been able to free myself 
from the perplexity caused to me as a furtherer of it, between 
the professional, and as it were exemplary kind of gravity 
expected of the inculcators of any creed, and the natural 
spirits, and old cheerful style of intercourse with my readers 
in ordinary, which the very nature of my religious convictions 
tends not only to warrant but to increase. Heaven, we may 
be assured, which has been pleased to gift us with smiles as 
well as tears, and with hearty laughter itself, does not weigh 
our levity, no, nor our gravity either, in any such scale of 
narrowness, as the dulness or dictatorialness of the would-be 
exclusively pious assume the privilege of determining. 

"Alas! 
Like smiles and tears upon an infant's face, 
Who wonders at himself, and at such things 
In others' faces, my swift thoughts are mixed." 

One of the last things that was said to me by my dying 
son expressed his adhesion to the religion in that book ; and 
the first adherent which it had, and who was the strongest in 
expressing to me the comfort which it gave her — I keep 
putting off the mention of what I must say, but time and 
necessity press me — was the partner of my life for more than 
half a century ; for I was married nearly as long ago, and I 
knew her some years before marriage. She followed her son 
at the beginning of 1857, and lies near him in the same 
ground. I dare to say little more. I now seemed — and it 
has become a consolation to me — to belong as much to the 
next world as to this, and think I know exactly how I shall 
feel when I die; more than half, perhaps, unwilling to go, 
inasmuch as pangs may attend the process, and life, by its 
nature, is not made willingly to be parted with ; but as far as 
affections are concerned, half sorrowing to leave those that 
still remain to be loved, and half solaced — I think I could 
even say rejoicing, if it were not for them — in the hope of 
meeting with those that are gone. My wife was a woman of 



LIFE DRAWING TOWARDS ITS CLOSE. 409 

great generosity, great freedom from every kind of jealousy, 
great superiority to illusions from the ordinary shows of pros- 
perity. In all the hazards to which I put our little means in 
the pursuit of what I thought it my duty to do in furtherance 
of social advancements, and all the injury which really re- 
sulted to them, she never uttered a word of objection. She 
was as uncomplaining during the worst storms of our adver- 
sity, as she was during those at sea in our Italian voyage. 
She had a fine eye for art, as she showed early in life, when 
wholly untaught, by cutting a little head of Homer in clay, 
which Mr. West pronounced to be of " extraordinary pro- 
mise ;" and she subsequently surprised everybody with her 
facility in cutting profiles of our friends in paper, so true 
to spirit as well as letter, as to make them laugh at the in- 
stantaneous recognition of the likeness. Wilkie (afterwards 
Sir David) was among their admirers, and (to use his own 
words), he said he " couldn't but wonder to think how the 
hard scissors could treat the lips in particular with so much 
expression." She then took some lessons from a sculptor ; 
and fortune seemed in her hands, when the worms, that a 
modeller cannot avoid in manipulating the fresh clay, sickened 
her so with her crushing them, that, being in a delicate state 
of health, she was obliged to give up the practice. A well- 
intended but ill-advised treatment of her constitution in girl- 
hood had brought on a life-long spitting of blood, which was 
only lessened by the years of acute rheumatism, that in de- 
priving her of all power of locomotion ultimately killed her ; 
though such is the strength given to weakness itself by a 
quiet domestic life, and the care of a good physician (Dr. 
Southwood Smith, famous for keeping friends in delicate 
health alive), that she outlived many another physician who 
had augured her a brief existence, and she died at the age of 
sixty-nine. I wonder how I can talk of these things as 
calmly as I do ; but I myself am in my seventy-fifth year, 
and I seem to be speaking more of those whom I am to join 
again shortly than of such as have left me at a distance. 
Like them too, though alive I decay ; and when I go to bed, 
and lie awhile on my back before turning to sleep, I often 
seem to be rehearsing, not without complacency or something 
better, the companionship of the grave. 

May all of us who desire to meet elsewhere do so, and be 
then shown the secret of the great, the awful, yet, it is to be 
trusted, the beautiful riddle ; for why (let it be asked again v 



410 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUXT. 

so much half-beauty here, and such need for completing it, if 
complete it is not to be ? I do not think that enough has 
been made of that argument from analogy, divine as was the 
mind of Plato that suggested it. Oh, why did any kind of 
religious creed ever put such injustice into its better portion, 
as to render it possible for any of the Maker's infirm creatures 
to wish it might not be true, even for others' sakes ? For my 
part, infirm as I am, I fear it not for myself or for my body, 
trusting, as I do, to that only kind of divineness which it is 
possible for me to believe in ; which has itself made it impos- 
sible for me to believe otherwise. As to the fulfilment of these 
yearnings on earth to be made entire in a future state, I can no 
more believe in the existence of regions in space where God has 
made half-orbs in their heavens, or half-oranges on their trees, 
than I can believe He will fail to make these anxious half- 
satisfied natures of ours which thus crave for completeness, as 
entire and rounded in that which they crave for, as any other 
fruits of his hands. 

To return to the business of the brief portion of life that 
remains to me : — I have only two more circumstances to par* 
ticularize ; both very pleasant in themselves, though occurring 
amidst a multitude of anxieties caused by vicissitudes in the 
fortunes, and bereavements in the homes, of dear friends and 
connections ; the worst of which is, as far as one's self is con- 
cerned, that one cannot make little means fill up large wishes. 

But to return to the circumstances alluded to. The first 
was the publication of an American edition of my collected 
poems, proposed to me and carried out in Boston by my friend 
Mr. Lee, one of the illustrious family of the Lees of Virginia, 
connections of Washington, and brother founders with him of 
the Republic; and the other (which sounds like an anti- 
climax; but is not so, for a reason which I shall presently 
mention), the appearance at last of a second of my plays at a 
London theatre, the one entitled Lovers' Amazements, of the 
nature of which an account has been given on a previous 
occasion. 

Both these circumstances of late occurrence have been very 
precious to me ; the first because of the universal burst of 
good- will towards me which it called forth from the American 
press, showing the heartiness with which the nation met the 
regrets of their kinsman at having in a moment of impatience 
with their booksellers confounded the feelings of the nation 
with a mistake in its ordinances: and the second circumstance, 



LIFE DRAWING TOWARDS ITS CLOSE. 411 

first, because the play brought forth a like manifestation of 
regard from the whole of the London press, showing an in- 
crease rather than a loss of old sympathies ; and secondly, 
because, on the first night of its performance, the audience 
called for me with the same fervour as on the appearance of 
the Legend of Florence, and 1 felt myself again, as it were, 
in the warm arms of my fellow-creatures, unmistaken, and 
never to be morbidized more. 

I cannot sufficiently express to either country the joy 
which these circumstances gave me, and the gocd which they 
have done me. They would have been more than a set-olf 
against the most painful portion of my life, if those whom I 
have lost had survived to partake the pleasure, and those who 
remain to me had not had trials of their own. But the 
pleasure is great still, and is shared still, to the comfort of us 
all; and the approach of my night-time is even yet adorned 
with a break in the clouds, and a parting smile of the sunset. 

May we all meet on some future day among the vortex of 
living multitudes, the souls of the dead, where "all tears shall 
be wiped off from all faces;" or, in another view of futurity, 
before that time arrives, may we all meet in one of Plato's 
vast cycles of re-existence, experiencing the sum-total of all 
that we have ever experienced and enjoyed before, only under 
those circumstances of amelioration in the amount which 
progressive man has been made to look for, and with no 
necessity for the qualification of errors excepted. 



POST3CKIPT. 

The event which was anticipated in the last chapter was not 
long delayed. Leigh Hunt died on the 28th August, 1859 ; and 
he was buried in the place of his choice, Kensall Green Ceme- 
tery. He had for about two years been manifestly declining in 
strength. Although well aware of the grand cause, and more 
than content to meet the will of his Creator, he still retained 
a keen interest in life, and with characteristic cheerfulness 
constantly hoped that some new plan — some change of diet, 
or of place — would restore him for a few years more of com- 
panionship with surviving friends. Just two months before 
completing his seventy-fifth year, he quietly sank to rest. He 
had come to the end of the chapter which the reader has just 
perused ; but the volumes were still awaiting one or two 
finishing touches, and it was left for other hands to el 



412 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 

For some months before the end he had been planning 
a removal from his cottage at Hammersmith to London, in 
order to be nearer to his eldest son and some of his most 
valued friends ; for he felt a renewed appetite for intercourse 
with other minds. In the interval, he was to visit some few 
friends out of town, especially Southwood Smith, and Charles 
Keynell, who lived near at hand. It is an interesting in- 
cident, that his very last efforts were devoted to aid the rela- 
tives of Shelley in vindicating the memory of the friend who 
had gone so many years before him. Among the passing visits 
of these later days was one to his old friend Charles Oilier, who 
contributed such important materials to the Shelley Memorials ; 
a valued companion being Charles Ollier's son, Edmund, who 
was engaged in the same congenial task. Another of his 
latest visits was paid on purpose to see, and solace, an admir- 
able friend whose excellence he had learned but lately to appre- 
ciate at its full. The sense of beauty and gentleness, of moral 
beauty and faithful gentleness, grew upon him as the clear 
evening closed in. 

When he went to visit his relative at Putney, he still car- 
ried with him his work and the books he more immediately 
wanted. Although his bodily powers had been giving way, 
his most conspicuous qualities — his memory for books, and his 
affection — remained ; and when his hair was white, when his 
ample chest had grown slender, when the very proportion of 
his height had visibly lessened, his step was still ready, and his 
dark eyes brightened at every happy expression and at every 
thought of kindness. His death was simply exhaustion : he 
broke off his work to lie down and repose. So gentle was the 
final approach, that he scarcely recognized it till the very last, 
and then it came without terrors. His physical suffering had 
not been severe ; at the latest hour he said that his only " un- 
easiness " was failing breath. And that failing breath was used 
to express his sense of the inexhaustible kindnesses he had 
received from the family who had been so unexpectedly made 
his nurses, — -to draw from one of his sons, by minute, eager, 
and searching questions, all that he could learn about the latest 
vicissitudes and growing hopes of Italy, — to ask the friends and 
children around him for news of those whom he loved, — and 
to send love and messages to the absent who loved him. 



Printed by Smith, Elder and Co., Little Green Arbour Court, Old Bailey, E.C. 



WORKS BY LEIGH HUNT. 



A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla. 

With Illustrations by Eichard Doyle. 8vo. Price 
55. cloth. 

Men, Women, and Books : 

A Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs, 
from his uncollected Prose Writings. 2 vols. Post 
8vo. Price 10s. cloth. 

Table Talk. 

To which are added Imaginary Conversations of Pope 
and Swift. Post 8vo. Price 5s. cloth. 

Wit and Humour. 

Selected from the English Poets ; with an Illustrative 
Essay, and Critical Comments. Second Edition. 
Post 8vo. Price 5s. cloth. 

The Town. 

With Forty-five Engravings. Price 2s. 6cl. cloth. 

"We will allow no higher enjoyment for a rational Englishman 
than to stroll leisurely through this marvellous town arm in arm 
with Mr. Leigh Hunt. The charm of Mr. Hunt's book is, that he 
gives us the outporings of a mind enriched with the most agree- 
able knowledge ; there is not one page which does not glow with 
interest. It is a series of pictures from the life, representing 
scenes in which every inhabitant of the metropolis has an in- 
terest." — Times. 



LONDON : SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 



SMITH, ELDER AND CO.'S 

CHEAP SERIES OF POPULAR WORKS. 



Life of Charlotte Bronte (Currer Bell), 

Author of " Jane Eyre," &c, By Mrs. Gaskell. 
Price 2s. 6d. 

Lectures on the English Humourists 

Of the Eighteenth Century. By W. M. Thackeray, 
Author of " Vanity Fair," "Esmond," "The Vir- 
ginians," &c. Price 2s. 6d. cloth. 

British India. 

By Harriet Martineau. Price 2s. 6d. cloth. 

" Lucid, glowing, and instructive essays." — Economist 
" A good compendium of a great subject." — National Review, 
" As a handbook to the history of India it is the best that has 
yet appeared."— Morning Herald. 

Deerbrook. 

By Harriet Martineau. Price 2s. Gd. cloth. 

Below the Surface. 

By Sir A. H. Elton, Bart., M.P. Price 2s. 6d. cloth. 

" ' Below the Surface ' bears out the title well. The incidents 
are naturally and dramatically introduced, and all the provincial 
scenes are vividly represented. It is a decided succes. "—Press. 

" It is a novel worth reading, and some parts of it are worth 
remembering. The story offers many points of interest and dra- 
matic power; and there is considerable humour in some of the 
scenes." — Economist. 

Kathie Brande : 

The Fireside History of a Quiet Life. By Holme 
Lee, Author of " Sylvan Holt's Daughter." Price 
2s. 6d. cloth. 

ft c Kathie Brande ' is not merely a very interesting novel — it is 
a very wholesome one, for it teaches virtue by example." — Critic. 

" * Kathie Brande ' is intended to illustrate the paramount ex- 
cellence of duty as a moving principle. It is full of beauties." — 
Daily News. 



CHEAP SERIES OF POPULAR WORKS. 

Jane Eyre. 

By Cuebeb Bell. Price 2s. 6d. cloth. 

Shirley. 

By Currer Bell. Price 2s. 6d. cloth. 

Villette. 

By Currer Bell. Price 2s. Gd. cloth. 

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 

By Acton Bell. 

Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey* 

By Ellis and Acton Bell. With Memoir by Currer 
Bell. Price 2s. Gd. cloth. 

The Professor. 

By Currer Bell. To which are added, the Poems 
of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Post 8vo. 2s. Gd. 
cloth. 

Political Economy of Art. 

By John Ruskin, M.A. Price 2s. Gd. cloth. 

" A most able, eloquent, and well-timed work. We hail it with 
satisfaction, thinking it calculated to do much practical good, and 
we cordially recommend it to our readers." — Witness. 

"Mr. Ruskin's chief purpose is to treat the artist's power, and 
the art itself, as items of the world's wealth, and to show how 
these may be best evolved, produced, accumulated, and distributed." 
— AthencBum. 

Italian Campaigns of General Bonaparte. 

By George Hooper. With a Map. Price 25. Gd. 
cloth. 
u The story of Bonaparte's campaigns in Italy is told at once 
firmly, lightly, and pleasantly. The latest and best authorities, 
the Bonaparte correspondence in particular, appear to have been 
carefully and intelligently consulted. The result is a very readable 
and useful volume." — Athenaeum. 

Tales of the Colonies. 

By Charles Bowcroft. Price 2s. Gd. cloth. 
" ' Tales of the Colonies ' is an able and interesting book. The 
author has the first great requisite in fiction— a knowledge of the 
life he undertakes to describe ; and his matter is solid and real."— 
Spectator. 



CHEAP SERIES OF POPULAR WORKS. 

A Lost Love. 

By Ashford Owen. Price 25. cloth. 
" ' A Lost Love ' is a story full of grace and genius. No out- 
line of the story would give any idea of its beauty." — Athenceum. 

Romantic Tales. 

By the Author of " John Halifax, Gentleman." 

Price 2s. 6cl. cloth. 

" ' Avilion ' is a beautiful and fanciful story, and the rest make 

very agreeable reading. There is not one of them unquickened by 

true feeling, exquisite taste, and a pure and vivid imagination."— 

Examiner. 

Domestic Stories. 

By the Author of " John Halifax, Gentleman," 
Price 2s. 6d. cloth 

" There is not one of them unquickened by true feeling, ex- 
quisite taste, and a pure and vivid imagination." — Examiner. 

After Dark. 

By Wilkie Collins. Price 2s. 6d. cloth. 
" Mr. Wilkie Collins stands in the foremost rank of our younger 
writers of fiction. He tells a story well and forcibly, his style is 
eloquent and picturesque ; he has considerable powers of pathos; 
understands the art of construction; is never wearisome or wordy, 
and has a keen insight into character." — Daily News. 

Paul Ferroll. 

Fourth Edition. Price 2s. cloth. 

" The art displayed in presenting Paul Ferroll throughout the 
story is beyond all praise." — Examiner, 

" We have seldom read so wonderful a romance. We can find 
no fault in it as a work of art. It leaves us in admiration, almost 
in awe, of the powers of its author." — New Quarterly. 

School for Fathers. 

By Talbot Gwynne. Price 2s. cloth. 
" ' The School for Fathers ' is one of the cleverest, most bril- 
liant, genial, and instructive stories that we have read since the 
publication of ' Jane Eyre/ " — Eclectic Review. 



LONDON : SMITH, ELDEE AND CO., 65, COKNHILL. 










V 



i v 



^^ 



^ < 



•fz. v^ 



^ v> 



N ^. 









• 7 c ,M J 

f v 
A^ V '^ 




* x ' * 



.0 



v 

% 






. \ ! 









\0 o 









\V </> 






V > 



\ x 









,0 c 



C* » 



J * 







-A 



v 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Date: April 2009 



Neutralizin 
V Treatment 

PreservationTechnologies 



■^^ 



A'' 






<$+ 



A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 
(724)779-2111 



* A 



-— 



- 









D 






. 









'^ 









LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





014 492 983 4 • 



